The article Psychiatry, Mental Health Care, and the Black Freedom Struggle: Chicago’s Woodlawn Mental Health Center, written by Martin Summers and published in the Journal of American History can interest h-madness readers.

Here is the abstract:

“From 1964 to 1970, the staff of the Woodlawn Mental Health Center conducted an intervention program and research study in a dozen elementary schools in Woodlawn, a predominantly African American neighborhood in the South Side of Chicago. Working with first graders whom teachers identified as “maladaptive,” and their parents, the center’s staff sought to establish a correlation between the ability of students to adapt to their environment and their “psychological well-being.” The program’s designers utilized a variety of diagnostic tools and therapeutic strategies to improve the learning proficiency of the first graders in the study and to demonstrate the importance of providing mental health services in schools. Although the center’s Community Mental Health Assessment and Evaluation Unit published the somewhat narrow findings of its study in 1975, the data sets it produced and subsequent longitudinal research would go on to form the basis of academic studies over the next forty years—studies on topics that ranged from teenage motherhood to factors contributing to high school drop-out rates, from Black women’s voting behavior to the relationship between childhood trauma and adult drug use”.