ALVIN F. POUSSAINT, M.D.: CREATING CERTAINTY IN AN UNCERTAIN WORLD

ALVIN F. POUSSAINTL M.D. IS PICTURED ABOVE MAKING A POINT DURING A LIVE AIRING OF A PANEL DISCUSSION ON “MEET THE PRESS” IN NBC’s NEW YORK STUDIOS ON SUNDAY, 11 JANUARY 2009 (PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF NBC (WWW.NBC.COM))

When Alvin F. Poussaint, M.D. speaks, the world listens. Dr. Poussaint, through his extensive body of written work consisting of published books and articles and essays published in newspapers, magazines, and professional journals and in interviews aired on radio and television news programs, moves the world to rethink what it believes about childrearing, violence, race relations, suicide, and substance abuse. While he does not think of himself as a trailblazer, Dr. Poussaint successfully navigated pathways which were devoid of footprints. Today, many souls who find themselves trekking down these same pathways have the indelible footprints of Dr. Poussaint to guide them on their journey. Dr. Poussaint found himself creating certainty in an uncertain world — not just for himself — but for generations of souls behind him. He played a pivotal role in the racial integration of Harvard Medical School in the 1970s through his work with the late Robert Higgins Ebert, M.D., Dean of the Harvard Medical School at the time, and then-President of Harvard University Derek C. Bok, Esquire. As a result of Dr. Poussaint’s efforts to transform Harvard Medical School into an institution of inclusiveness, more than 1,300 underrepresented minority students have graduated from the school and enrollment has expanded to include African American, Native American, Puerto Rican, and Mexican-American students.

I was introduced to Dr. Poussaint’s profound research and body of written work during my freshman year in college. When one of my Professors, the late Paul Thompson, wanted to drive home the point that films and television commercials, situation comedies, and dramas contain powerful subliminal messages which help to create and perpetuate damaging stereotypical images that unconsciously shape our perception of ourselves and others, how we are perceived and treated by others, our decision making, and even our behavior, he enlisted the assistance of Alvin F. Poussaint, M.D. Reading essays penned by Dr. Poussaint that were published in The Black Scholar (www.theblackscholar.org) was woven into our course work. Dr. Poussaint’s essays explored, among other things, the power of imagery — particularly for souls of African descent. Like most souls at that time, I viewed television and film as a source of entertainment and not as a purveyor of deliberately crafted subliminal messages that were purposefully immersed in stereotypical imagery and messages that were designed to drive my decisions and perceptions. Dr. Poussaint’s essays impressed upon us the significance of imagery and subliminal messages, our need to analyze and rethink everything we see and hear, and to decipher the subliminal messages that invaded our subconscious.

Dr. Poussaint quickly won my admiration and respect. He is a man who unabashedly “speaks truth to power”. His audacious refusal to dance around “hot button” issues, and the solutions-based eloquence with which he articulates many of the key challenges that prevent souls, perceived to be invisible by mainstream America and the world, from reaching their full potential is, to say the least, empowering and soothing. Although I never considered myself voiceless, in my eyes, Dr. Poussaint is someone strategically positioned on the world stage who tells my story — validates me — fights for me — in interviews on radio and television news programs, in the articles, essays and books he authors, and on panel discussions and in lectures. At the same time and, more importantly, I was struck by the agility with which this courageous truth teller transcended boundaries and the quiet and unceremonious manner in which he empowers and supports others.

His formative years were spent in East Harlem. Dr. Poussaint’s consistently stellar academic performance resulted in his enrollment in the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, an educational institution for gifted students in Manhattan. His insatiable desire for knowledge manifested itself in his interest in a wide range of subjects which included science, mathematics, language, and music. He even taught himself how to play the clarinet, saxophone, and flute. Dr. Poussaint also developed an interest in writing — an interest that culminated in his becoming the Associate Editor of the school’s literacy magazine and receiving the Creative Writing Award upon his graduation. Although Dr. Poussaint received an acceptance letter from Yale University, he pursued his academic studies at Columbia University in New York in compliance with his Father’s wish that he attend a local academic institution. He has been quoted as describing his academic sojourn at Columbia University as academically challenging, but socially disappointing. He recalls:

“Social situations were awkward, there being a prevalent feeling among Whites that Blacks shouldn’t come to social events.”

When Dr. Poussaint entered Cornell Medical College in 1956 after graduating from Columbia University, out of 86 students, he was the only African American student. The experience of contending with racism at Cornell Medical College, which was compounded by his experiences at Stuyvesant High School and Columbia University, propelled him to study the psychological effects of racial bias. He elected to study Psychiatry. From 1961 through 1964, Dr. Poussaint interned at the Neuropsychiatric Institute of the University of California at Los Angeles. During his final year at the Neuropsychiatric Institute, Dr. Poussaint became its Chief Resident.

The depth of Dr. Poussaint’s involvement in the American Civil Rights Movement is particularly intriguing. No soul involved in the American Civil Rights Movement could or would emerge from it unchanged and uninfluenced. Dr. Poussaint’s experiences and work in the American Civil Rights Movement has been and continues to be a strong driving force in his career. This becomes glaringly apparent when one listens to a National Visionary Leadership Project (www.visionaryproject.org) interview which has been reproduced and is available on You Tube. During the interview, Dr. Poussaint discusses his role in the American Civil Rights Movement. In that interview, he recalls that both he and his younger sister Julie were involved in the American Civil Rights Movement:

“Julie oversaw the Students for Non Violent Coordinating Committee’s New York Office and oversaw the people who were going South. The other person who was involved and who got me to go to South was Bob Moses after three Civil Rights workers were killed. I was told that they needed a doctor down there full time. Well, it was preceded by two other experiences which softened the blow or got me prepared. When they were trying to get me to go to Mississippi, they invited me down to Mississippi for a weekend in early March of 1965 to meet Bob Smith, a doctor. We stayed at his house and met all of these people in the movement — all of the leaders in the movement in Mississippi — I got to meet everybody so that I could see what I was getting myself into. So I did that and I went back to Los Angeles. Then I got a call from one of the ‘Movement people’ — I believe it came from SCLC or SNCC. They called me to ask me if I would return to be the doctor for the Selma March and walk with them the 50 miles with the marchers and organize the medical care. I said ‘Yes’. So I went down on March 20th and stayed for the whole March — marched the 50 miles, pitched tents, and took care of the Civil Rights workers for the Selma March. After the Selma March, I got back to Los Angeles, I came back feeling more connected to the ‘Movement people’. I became very close to and impressed with many of the marchers including teenaged boys and girls on that March and their spirit and some bonding took place.”

During the interview, when asked if he knew how potentially dangerous it was when he agreed to go to Selma, particularly, the danger connected to participating in the Selma March, Dr. Poussaint had this to say:

“I knew it was dangerous. With the Selma March, after I got there, I felt a little bit better when I saw all of those troops. Remember, they had to nationalize the Guard. And there were helicopters and there were jeeps next to us with soldiers with helmets and rifles. And at the camp site when we pitched tent, they had troops surrounding the tents all night long. So you felt protected. What was scary was that you knew you were not totally protected. The night before the March, Reverend James Reeb was murdered — he was from Boston — and the night the March ended — Viola Liuzzo was murdered in a car going back to Selma. So you knew that either of them could have been you if the situation was different. So you were scared. I was more frightened when I got back to Mississippi and knew I was there permanently. I was frightened because of the tension in the air. There was so much tension of fights and warfare and beatings — that whole atmosphere that led to the murder of the Civil Rights workers. I was seeing people who had been beaten. And there were still situations where you would go to restaurants and they would put you out and tell you: ‘We don’t serve your kind here.’ So I stayed out of those places. And you know that it was probably against the law at that point. It was before the Civil Rights law was passed, so it was illegal there to serve you. It was still that kind of climate, so I stayed out of those places. There were all kinds of rituals which could get you very upset and get you into fights and get you thrown into jail. I would go to the laundry— there were no black laundries — with my shirts — and they had a white pile and a colored pile, so I would put my shirts in the colored pile. I would go to a grocery store and I would be waiting in line to cash out and all of the white people would get in front of me because they were not allowed to serve me until all of the white people had been served. If you said something to the clerk about it, they would call the police. Well, I did say something to the clerk and the police were called and I said: ‘I have been waiting here a long time and I just want to pay and get out of here.’ They would just look at me knowing that I was not one of the local people. The same thing would happen at the bank with the tellers. We had to be on the marches and be there when people were injured. Sometimes we went into restaurants and you knew they didn’t want you there but they would serve you. They would give you a look as if to say, ‘What are you doing here?’ You were given such hostile treatment — they would serve you cold meals. And I think they must have had a sense of humor because at the end, they would say: ‘You hurry up and come back again now, you hear?’”

Was he inspired and affected by the relationships he developed with the Civil Rights leaders he met over the course of his stay in the South?

”Yes, but I admired a lot of the young people who were not even known who worked for me and helped me get around the State of Mississippi who knew the ins and outs . . . who were smart and knew all of the subtleties and knew the dangers. I met Marian Wright Edelman who was across the street and Eleanor Holmes Norton who was also across the street. I met them in Mississippi. Bob Moses used to come to my house and we would have meetings at my house and dinner which the FBI always knew about it. They were spying all over the place. The next day, the FBI would come into my office and say, ‘How did the meeting go last night, Dr. Poussaint?’ I met people like John Lewis, Floyd McKissick, and, of course, Dr. King, whom I admired a great deal and thought he was awfully smart — very politically smart — and he governed in such a way — he was a consensus leader."

How did Dr. Poussaint decide to become a psychiatrist and then join the Civil Rights Movement?

“It did have an effect on my decision to go into Psychiatry. It influenced me somewhat. But I also flirted heavily with neurology because I was interested in how the brain worked. . . . I almost opted to go into dermatology. I didn’t make the final decision to go into psychiatry until I was midway into my internal medicine internship. I decided that I wanted to be a humanist psychiatrist. One of the reasons was that I did not want to give up my stethoscope and medical stuff. And for that reason, I picked a program at UCLA where you kept your white coat and your stethoscope. I felt that I spent four years at being good at being a doctor and now I wasn’t going to use it . . . I was just going to talk to people. I moonlighted in the evening — one or two evenings each week for the whole five years I was at UCLA at an emergency clinic doing medicine. By the time I finished Psychiatry, I was a very good generalist doctor — including how to treat wounds and read x-rays. So, when I went to Mississippi and set up shop I knew all of the medical stuff so that I didn’t have to call on the other doctors because I could do everything myself except for things like very bad wounds that I did not have the equipment to deal with.”

A free thinker and truth teller, Dr. Poussaint, created quite a stir among his colleagues when he boldly drew a straight line to ”extreme racism” and mental illness. No doubt, the scenarios he witnessed while accompanying Dr. King on Civil Rights marches in the South and as the Southern Field Director of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in Jackson, Mississippi, provided abundant factual evidence for his pronouncement. His pronouncement took the form of, among other things, an article published in the 26 August 1999 issue of The New York Times entitled, “They Hate, They Kill, Are They Insane?” In 2002, Dr. Poussaint penned another article entitled, “Is Extreme Racism A Mental Illness?” which was published in the Western Journal of Medicine. In the article, Poussaint mounted an argument for the inclusion of extreme racism in the American Psychiatric Association’s official list of mental disorders and stated:

“Clearly, anyone who scapegoats a whole group of people and seeks to eliminate them to resolve his or her internal conflicts meets criteria for a delusional disorder, a major psychiatric illness.”

He revisited the issue in 2015 with the penning of an article, “Extreme Racism A Mental Illness?”, published by the Clinical Psychiatry News on 16 July 2015. The latter article by Dr. Poussaint came on the heels of the murder of nine African American members of a Charleston, South Carolina church by a Caucasian male who is alleged to have said that he wanted to ignite a race war in the United States. Dr. Poussaint noted that while the media characterized the perpetrator of the murders as “deranged”, “demented” and “delusional”, the American Psychiatry Association has contested extreme racism (as opposed to ordinary prejudice) as being a mental health problem. Dr. Poussaint went on to say:

“. . . After multiple racist killings in the Civil Rights era, a group of Black psychiatrists sought to have extreme bigotry — not ordinary bigotry — defined as a mental disorder. The association’s officials rebuffed the recommendation, arguing that so many Americans are racist that even extreme racism is normative and better thought of as a social aberration than an indication of individual psychopathology. Societal racism facilitates incorporating bigotry into a person’s racist psychotic and antisocial dysfunction. Many murderous paranoid schizophrenics have had racial targets at the core of their psychotic delusions. The criminal justice system (perhaps a step ahead of psychiatry) now refers to such violence as hate crimes — but that tells us little about the offender’s psychological state. . . . To continue perceiving extreme racism as normative and not pathologic is to lend it legitimacy.”

Dr. Poussaint has also taken aim at mental health issues in the African American community — a community where suicide is both the proverbial “elephant in the room” and an unpardonable sin. In the face of alarming statistics which reflected the fact that the suicide rate of African American men in the 20–24 age range was 10 times the suicide rate of their female counterparts between 1990 and 1995, Dr. Poussaint jumpstarted a much needed dialogue on suicide within the African American community through a powerful book, “Lay My Burden Down: Unraveling Suicide And The Mental Health Crisis Among African Americans” (www.amazon.com), which he co-authored with Ms. Amy Alexander, a journalist. The rising suicide rate in the African American community was occurring at the same time that the size of its middle class was exponentially increasing. Through “Lay My Burden Down: Unraveling Suicide And The Mental Health Crisis Among African Americans,”published in 2000, Dr. Poussaint and his co-author, Ms. Alexander, boldly drew a straight line to “Post Traumatic Slavery Syndrome” and the catastrophically spiraling suicide rates among African American Men. They continued to “go where Angels fear to tread” by connecting the dots between the deplorable state of affairs of the mental health of African Americans and a myriad of historical, economic, and psychosocial factors which shape what is referred to in the book as the “Black psyche” and issuing a clarion call for “psychological equity” for African Americans. While vigorously advocating for the need for implementation of “psychological equity” for African Americans, Dr. Poussaint has, with equal vigorousness, fought for professional equality within the field of psychiatry. The first Black Caucus of the American Psychiatric Association was attended by Dr. Poussaint in the late 1960s and in 1969 he was a member of the organization. When psychiatric studies and treatments surfaced which were immersed in glaring racial biases, Dr. Poussaint vociferously challenged their validity. As an example, in 1973, upon learning of a suggestion that psychosurgery should be implemented as a means of resolving urban violence, Dr. Poussaint addressed it in an interview published in Ebony Magazine:

“. . .This frightening idea assumes black people are genetically damaged — that they are so animal and so savage that whites have to carve on their brains to make them into human beings. The whole concept is vicious.”

Dr. Poussaint unabashedly calls out injustice as he quietly unlocks the doors of opportunity that had been closed to multitudes of brilliant faceless and nameless souls. Throughout his career and life, Dr. Poussaint has built bridges of inclusiveness. He has moved and continues to move a nation and a world to rethink, among other things, how it addresses ethnic intolerance; shapes the minds and souls of our children — our Next Generation of Leaders, Husbands, Fathers, Wives, and Mothers and “Emerging Keepers of the Planet”, and heals the psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually wounded souls among us. In a world that seems to normalize mediocrity, Dr. Poussaint reminds us to strive for excellence and to exceed our own expectations. For many reasons and in many ways, it appears that today’s world is operating from an “upside down” position. Many souls feel trapped in an expansive and paralyzing cloud of uncertainty from which they are desperately seeking an exit. The good news is that Dr. Poussaint’s expansive body of written works and research and the manner in which he has conducted his career and his life offer all of us critical “pieces of the puzzle” to turning an “upside down” world “right side up” and to creating certainty in an uncertainty world.