Drapetomania

Drapetomania was a supposed mental illness that, in 1851, American physician Samuel A. Cartwright hypothesized as the cause of black slaves fleeing captivity.

Quotes

 * In the nineteenth century, ... official Western medicine recognized drapetomania, the tendency of slaves to run away from their owners, as a disease. ... With hindsight, drapetomania is easily dismissed as a harmful fabrication of fictitious disease, in a culture violating human rights. Less easy is it to recognize harmful fabrications of our own era for what they are.
 * Are you sure that medicine and psychiatry are on the right track, morally and scientifically, in providing millions of person with drugs after having diagnosed them as depressed?
 * Wim J. van der Steen, Vincent K. Y. Ho, Ferry J. Karmelk, Beyond Boundaries of Biomedicine: Pragmatic Perspectives on Health and Disease (2003), p. 29


 * What had been drapetomania became depression. ... Modern man runs away from a life that seems to him a kind of slavery.
 * Thomas Szasz, "The Sane Slave: Social Control and Legal Psychiatry," American Criminal Law Review, vol. 10 (1971), p. 346