Race, Risk, and Pathology in Psychiatric Culture: Disease Awareness Campaigns as Governmental Rhetoric

Abstract

In 2006, the National Alliance on Mental Illness and the National Urban League, along with five other organizations, introduced the Depression is Real Campaign, a disease-awareness campaign targeting racial minorities. I trace the ways in which the Depression is Real Campaign frames the expansion of the depression diagnosis and pharmaceutical consumption as shared goals for racial justice advocacy groups and pharmaceutical corporations, focusing on the campaign's attempts to target African Americans. Although the campaign is framed as an antistigma, prorecovery intervention in the name of racial empowerment, it articulates racial and cultural differences as “risks” in the context of illness that must be eradicated through individual initiatives via the agency of medical science. Highly visible appeals to race are ultimately neutralized in the campaign's affirmation of a mobile neoliberal subjectivity unencumbered by the “weight” of racial history, structural inequality, or collective identification.