Jonathan Metzl

“What is the meaning of public health in an armed society?” asks psychiatrist and author Dr. JONATHAN METZL. In his vital new book, What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms, Metzl takes on an urgent topic: mass shootings and the contested social and racial politics of American firearms. Rather than preaching to one side or the other of the polarizing gun debate, he asks us to step back and think of the broader questions we face as a nation: How do we imagine safety? Are the divisions too deep, or is it possible to come together in solidarity? And, how on earth did we get here? This piercing analysis shows mass shootings as a symptom of our deepest unresolved conflicts. Metzl ultimately lights the long road of alliance-forging, racial-reckoning, and political power-brokering we must take to set things right.

A renowned psychiatrist and professor, Dr. Jonathan Metzl is a widely sought after speaker on topics ranging from race, racism, and mental health to “structural competency” and medical education, to health in the U.S. South, to the politics of racial resentment in America. In his genre-shifting book Dying of Whiteness, which won the 2020 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award and many other honors, he changed how we understand what it means to be white in an age where the politics of racial resentment are higher than ever before. A regular commentator for major media outlets like ABC News and MSNBC, Metzl is also the Director of Vanderbilt’s Department of Medicine, Health, and Society, and author of several acclaimed books that challenge the ways we think about illness and health—including Dying of Whiteness, The Protest Psychosis, Prozac on the Couch, and Against Health.

His latest book, What We’ve Become, Living and Dying in a Country of Arms, is a vital new perspective on our current moment. Using the lens of gun reform, Metzl shows how we can reckon with our national conflicts and forge a new path towards racial justice and solidarity. “What We’ve Become is not just a book about guns,” Jonathan says. Rather, it’s about how we can still come together to build a healthy democracy: by creating structures “that foster everyday life, education, pleasure, and commerce, bolster shared investment rather than mistrust, and welcome people who can engage with one another free from fear.” What We’ve Become is a New York Times Book Review Staff Pick and has been hailed as “consistently persuasive” by Kirkus, which calls it “a powerful, convincing effort to reframe the discussion.”

Jonathan Metzl’s award-winning 2019 book, Dying of Whiteness, provided a warning: white Americans were drawn to politicians who pledged to make their lives great again, but whose policies actually placed them at greater risk of illness and death. Racial resentment fueled pro-gun laws in Missouri, caused resistance to the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and drove cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. The direct results of these policies? Increasing deaths by gun suicide, rising dropout rates, and falling life expectancies. As Dr. Metzl shows in this talk, rather than mobilizing a course correction, falling life expectancy became the core on which was built an ever-more-expansive political movement during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to widespread dismantling of public health infrastructure and reinforcement of racial and class hierarchies. This talk ultimately offers a smart and necessary plan for working collectively toward a society that would be healthier for everyone.

As the US health care system looks to adapt to new, post-pandemic norms, we must begin to address the inequities made even more apparent by the COVID-19 pandemic. How can we reimagine and redesign the health care delivery and education systems through a lens of health equity and racial justice? Dr. Metzl argues that the answer lies with Structural Competency which calls for a new approach to the relationships among race, class, and symptom expression. While many health care professionals, social workers, and public health practitioners have long addressed structural determinants of health, clinical care has been focused on the individual, and often restricts the scope of cultural competency training to the beliefs and behaviors of individual patients. In this keynote, Dr. Metzl underscores how Structural Competency aims to develop a language and set of interventions to reduce health inequalities at the level of neighborhoods, institutions, and policies.

Battles over the role of “race” in education and the structures that uphold racial privilege and inequity burst into the national spotlight in the 2020s. But the origins of the debate, and the politics that undergird it, track back decades, and play out in unexpected ways. In this thought-provoking talk, Dr. Metzl provides an analysis of how, within the sociopolitical context of the 1960s and 1970s, the intersection of race and mental health altered the way that mental illness was diagnosed, understood, and treated in the United States. Once considered a nonthreatening disease that primarily targeted white middle-class women, Metzl provides an historical exploration of how schizophrenia became associated with the perceived hostility, rebellion, mistrust, and violence of Black men during the Civil Rights movement. Part historical case study and part social commentary, Metzl utilizes the complex history of the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan to showcase the detrimental impact that shifting definitions of schizophrenia had on Black men, and the implications of that history for CRT debates in the present-day.