Typical emo reporting on scientific issue

A tiresome NYT article, America’s Hidden Racial Divide: A Mysterious Gap in Psychosis Rates by Daniel Bergner.  The subheading is Black Americans experience schizophrenia and related disorders at twice the rate of white Americans. It’s a disparity that has parallels in other cultures.

All anecdote and emo storytelling with little clarity about the argument being made and hardly any data supporting the general assertion that Black Americans suffer higher levels of schizophrenia than other Americans because of the pernicious influence of racism in America.  

The default argument, the medical standard argument, is that African Americans have a greater genetic disposition towards schizophrenia than do whites.  Bergner acknowledges that but seems to want to argue that the increase in prevalence is triggered by the trauma of American racism.  

It is a particularly long article and you keep reading and reading, thinking Bergner is going to get at some point to a clear assertion and muster some evidence to support his case.  He doesn't.

Instead, among the incessant mewling, Bergner keeps raising all sorts of alternate explanations that seem far more likely than racism.  Family dysfunction, single-parent families, the default explanation of genetics, etc.  All are casually mentioned and discarded without examination.

The only thing interesting was in the subheading, and later in the article:

In the United States, Black-white ratios are at least 1.9 to one; some studies show that disparities for nonwhite Hispanics are narrower but still notable. In Europe overall, Black-white differentials hover in the vicinity of four to one. In England, the gap for Black Caribbean and Black African immigrants runs between four to one and more than six to one. In the Netherlands, for Moroccan, Surinamese and Antillean immigrants, the ratio is around three to one.

This data, on the surface, seems to actually support the establishment theory of genetic disposition.  African Americans are roughly 25% white, whereas Blacks in Europe tend to be immigrants from Africa or from the Caribbean with much lower admixture.  If genetics is a causal factor and African Americans are less "black" than immigrant Africans into Europe, then one would expect African Americans to have a lower rate of schizophrenia than black immigrants in Europe.  Consistent with the data.

I reached the end of the article without clarity of argument or presence of data or evidence.  It is all anecdote.  It remains an intriguing issue but it is badly treated by Bergner and the Times.

The most popular comment reflects on the poor journalism.

Jewel Firestone

Only one study is cited here, along with a general statement the a single researcher published "a flurry of papers". The rest is all anecdotal. The sentence "as a growing body of research reveals" does all the heavy lifting for the main thesis. 

Psychosis from schizophrenia is a horrifying condition that is referenced throughout human history, from all cultures. People are born with schizophrenia and live their whole lives with it. Sometimes medication and managed treatment helps. Many times, in fact.

The overwhelming cause of schizophrenia is genetic inheritance. It's true that outside factors can trigger or exacerbate the condition in adulthood.

This article, however, tries to attach the condition to the Black experience. It does so mostly through implication and correlation. In my opinion this is incredibly insensitive and dismissive of the wide range of the human population that live with this terrible condition.

A sincere exploration of mental illness in our society is long overdue. Articles like this treat it like competition for compassion. Everybody loses when it gets framed in these terms, including the people in this article.

I genuinely hope the people mentioned here find relief and some peace. I hope the same for the rest of humanity, regardless of their race, that lives with it.