During research for her 2016 book, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration, religion scholar Judith Weisenfeld was struck by the rate at which African Americans were admitted to mental hospitals with the diagnosis of mental illness due to religious causes from 1880 through the 1940s.

“When I looked,” says Weisenfeld, a religion professor at Princeton University, “I saw an overwhelming body of literature where African American religious practices were central to psychiatrists’ evaluations of the Black psyche.”

This led to her new book, Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake (NYU, Apr. 2025). It demonstrates, she says, how psychiatrists’ focus on Black religion as a marker of mental illness “served as a basis for exclusion, containment, and marginalizing in slavery’s long wake.”

The book opens with a description of Judy B., a Black woman and a long-term patient during the early 20th century at St. Elizabeths, a government-run mental hospital in Washington, D.C. Judy B. was being treated for what white physicians referred to as “religious excitement,” and her case history included descriptions of “catching witches” and communicating with the spirit world. “Her interest in witches,” Weisenfeld says, “exemplifies what white researchers characterized as a ‘natural superstition of the negro race.’ ”

Even if the religious beliefs and practices of white patients were interpreted as problematic, those participants were treated as individuals, Weisenfeld points out. “There is no literature of psychosis among white followers of X, Y, or Z, but there is so much about the ‘negro insane,’ ” she says. “It is its own research category. I had no idea that this was what I was going to find. I have learned so much.”

Jennifer Hammer, senior editor at NYU Press, calls Weisenfeld “an amazing archival researcher” whose deep research reveals how Black religion was pathologized as mental illness, how beliefs and practices were framed as innate racial qualities, and how the theories of white psychiatrists were used to “limit the possibilities for Black self-determination.” Hammer adds: “This was in the decades after the Civil War and white people were essentially saying, ‘Look at these people, they’re unfit for freedom. They’re not able to vote. They’re not able to take part in society, because they’re crazy.’ ”

Today, racialized medical ideas are still prevalent in areas of healthcare and beyond, Weisenfeld tells PW. She links instances of police brutality against Black people to early psychiatry’s use of “religious excitement,” as well as the characteristics assigned to Black people by white physicians, including superstitious belief, gullibility to cult leaders, and a tendency to be emotional.

Weisenfeld specifically cites the killing of a 36-year-old Black woman, Sonya Massey, who was shot in her Illinois home by a sheriff’s deputy named Sean Grayson on July 6, 2024, after telling the officer, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” according to the Washington Post.

“
There is no literature of psychosis among white followers of X, Y, or Z, but there is so much about the ‘negro insane.’ 
”

“Even when there isn’t an explicit assumption about religion, the resonances are sometimes there,” Weisenfeld says. “I wasn’t surprised in this case of Massey—that her invocation of faith didn’t calm the police officer—it accelerated him.”

Weisenfeld adds, “There is a long history that we should be alarmed by. There are lots of ways that Black people have been denied political, religious, and social status, and framing their religious practices as promoting mental disorder was one of the ways.”