Listen, followers of my work know that I have been open about getting therapy for abuse since a young age. I’ve tried to do it from a place that is realistic about the obstacles for Black people. One of them being trust. Therapy requires soul level vulnerability and that requires trust. The medical community has not established trust within the Black community. This mistrust isn’t imagined—it’s inherited from generations of medical abuse, neglect, experimentation, and silence.

✨ The truth is:

There is a deep racial disparity in how the history of lobotomies has been recorded, studied, and remembered. The lack of documentation around lobotomies performed on Black people is not because it didn’t happen—it’s because of systemic erasure, dehumanization, and the deliberate undervaluing of Black patients’ lives in medical records and research.

Let’s break it down:

🧠 1. Medical Racism and Underreporting

Black patients were routinely excluded from formal case studies, clinical trials, and published psychiatric data—unless it served a white medical agenda.
When Black people were subjected to procedures like lobotomies, it was often done:

• In under-resourced segregated institutions

• Without consent or proper records

• Without the intention of follow-up, research, or inclusion in medical literature

📌 If the patient wasn’t expected to be restored to full citizenship, humanity, or family life—their case was “less important” to document.

🧱 2. Segregated Asylums and “Charity” Hospitals

In the mid-1900s, Black people were often placed in segregated psychiatric hospitals (sometimes called “asylums for the colored insane”) where they were more likely to experience:

• Forced experimentation

• Drug testing

• Electroshock therapy

• Psychosurgeries like lobotomies with little or no oversight

But because these hospitals were underfunded and viewed as places of “containment” rather than healing, detailed records were not maintained, shared, or preserved.

✂️ 3. Lobotomies as a Tool of Social Control

Lobotomies were often marketed as a way to “calm” difficult patients—especially women and the poor.

For Black people, this intersected with racial control.
There’s limited but revealing evidence that:

• Black women were labeled “aggressive” or “insane” for resisting abusive conditions or asserting autonomy

• Lobotomies were used to manage “undesirable” traits—not to heal, but to suppress and contain

Walter Freeman—the leading lobotomy advocate—believed that Black families had stronger support systems, and therefore, that Black patients were “better candidates” for lobotomies.

That belief? It came from racism masquerading as “research.”

🚨 4. The Silence Is a Symptom

The lack of widespread discussion or documentation isn’t accidental—it’s part of a pattern:

• Black people’s medical histories are often excluded from public narratives

• Survivors and descendants have rarely been given platforms to share these stories

• Institutions have shown little incentive to excavate this specific past

And when they do?
They often frame it as “a few cases” or anomalies—not the pattern that it was.

🕯️ 5. Same Story, Different Form

Even today, Black women and children are:

• Over-medicated

• Underdiagnosed with trauma

• Misdiagnosed with behavioral issues

• Given harsher psychiatric treatments

• Live under a system that denies that poverty and racism contributes greatly to their mental health issues.

This is the updated form of the same violation of boundaries and personhood.

🧠 Lobotomies Performed on Black Individuals

• Black Children Subjected to Lobotomies: In the mid-20th century, some Black children, as young as five years old, were subjected to lobotomies for behaviors deemed aggressive or hyperactive. These procedures were part of a broader pattern of medical experimentation on Black individuals without proper consent or ethical considerations. BlackPast.org

• Lobotomies on Black Prisoners: In the late 1960s and early 1970s, several physicians performed lobotomies on Black prisoners in state prisons, not on white inmates. These actions were part of a troubling agenda targeting Black individuals based on their political beliefs or behaviors. History News Network+1Real Change News+1

✊🏾 So What Can We Do?

• Name it, even when history books don’t.

• Look to oral histories, activist scholarship, and survivor accounts—because that’s where the truth lives.

• Push for medical accountability and the preservation of Black health histories.

Because when it comes to Black people and psychiatric harm?

📢 The silence isn’t proof of absence. It’s proof of erasure.

Related: 

American Psychiatric Association Apology Fails To Fully Admit Psychiatry’s Racial Human Rights Abuses and Role In Creating Racism

FACTS ABOUT INSTITUTIONAL RACISM IN THE MENTAL HEALTH INDUSTRY (STILL STEEPED IN EUGENICS)

Citizens Commission on Human Rights® of Colorado

Race and Gender in the Selection of Patients for Lobotomy

🧬 Henrietta Lacks and the Unauthorized Use of Her Cells

• HeLa Cells Taken Without Consent: In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman, had her cancer cells taken without her knowledge or consent at Johns Hopkins Hospital. These cells, known as HeLa cells, became the first immortal human cell line and have been instrumental in numerous medical breakthroughs.

• Lawsuits and Ethical Concerns: The Lacks family has filed lawsuits against companies profiting from HeLa cells, highlighting ongoing ethical concerns regarding consent and compensation in medical research. Axios+4Wikipedia+4Reuters+4