
The Conversation | Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy
And, according to his FBI record, the militant civil rights leader Malcolm X was a “pre-psychotic paranoid schizophrenic”: a diagnosis made based on his activism and protest speech. As Jonathan Metzl has shown, the descriptors used to “diagnose” Malcolm X were later enshrined in the American Psychiatric Association’s 1968 updated definition of schizophrenia. Dissent in the US was as potentially pathological as dissent anywhere else.