History of Black Adjustment Disorder

by Kenny Anderson

From the Portuguese slave forts established on the Gold Coast of Africa, Ghana in 1482, to the poverty-stricken hyper-segregated communities that many Blacks in America still live in today has been an Adjustment Disorder.

Adjustment disorder (AD) is a psychological response to an identifiable stressor or group of stressors that cause(s) significant emotional or behavioral symptoms, A stressor is generally an event of a serious, unusual nature that an individual or group of individuals experience.

The stressors that cause adjustment disorders may be grossly traumatic; the more chronic or recurrent the stressor, the more likely it is to produce a disorder. The ongoing adjustment disorder Blacks have experienced is the constant stressor of racial oppression that’s rooted in our acute stress reaction to slavery.

Indeed, Blacks’ historical experience of racial oppression has caused psychopathologies. Captured by Portuguese and other European slave traders, Africans had to go from Adjustment Disorders in slave forts to Adjustment Disorders on slave ships, where they were stacked like sardines in the unventilated hulls.

Professor S.E. Anderson described the conditions on the bottom of these ‘death ships’: “The screams, moans, crying, coughing, wretching, wailing, prayer cries, are all around you, in you. The pains, open sores, pus, mucous, blood, human waste, foaming drool, the chain cuts – gashes, flies, parasitic bugs, rats, filth, the hot smothering stinking air are all around you, in you. In fact, you have merged your being with the total ‘African Agony’ on board a vessel moving away from the Motherland”.

Arriving in American ports, after surviving the dreaded ‘Middle Passage’ voyage, Black slaves had Adjustment Disorders of being in a strange land, horrorified, traumatized, humiliated, sold on auction blocks, enslaved, separated from family, relatives, and countrymen; branded, whipped, stripped of name and cultural identity; held in slave bondage for 246 years (1619 – 1865).

Though slavery ended, the Reconstruction Era beginning in 1865 was a period of Black ‘Re-enslavement’, where Blacks with no resources to be free after being so-called emancipated, were forced back on the plantation in debt peonage as sharecroppers.

With no slavery Reparations (40 Acres & Mule) to be independent and no money Blacks had to finance their re-enslavement by borrowing money for supplies, food, and rent from the plantation owners (former slave masters). Being indebted neo-slaves, Blacks were super-exploited to remain constantly behind in their debts; they could not stop sharecropping until they paid off their debt.

Black re-enslavement was made possible by legislation passed by Southern states after the American Civil War known as ‘Black Codes’, laws designed to control the labor, movements, and activities of Blacks. Southern legislators believed Blacks were predestined to work as agricultural laborers and domestics. The Black Codes regulations left Blacks with little freedom and guaranteed a new slave workforce!!

In order to guarantee the enforcement of the Black Codes, the terrorist Ku Klux Klan (KKK) organization was founded by veterans of the Confederate Army and supported by Southern government officials. The KKK’s purpose was to restore white supremacy in the aftermath of the Civil War by terrorizing, lynching, and murdering Blacks, particularly Black men.

Psychologically, after the jubilation of emancipation and then re-enslaved and terrorized, Blacks suffered from an Adjustment Disorder with a specific depressed mood known as the ‘Blues’.

During the Reconstruction period Blacks became ‘dismally low in spirits’; fell into a ‘deep funk’ of powerlessness, worthlessness, over-burdenedness, madness, downheartedness, heavy-heartedness, broken-heartedness, mournfulness, and sadness.

In his book, ‘The Spirituals & The Blues’, Theology Professor James H. Cone stated: “Slavery is the historical background out of which the Blues were created. Suffering and its relation to Blackness is inseparable from the meaning of the Blues. Without pain and suffering, and what that meant for Black people in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas, there would have been no Blues.

The Blue mood means sorrow, frustration, despair, and Black people’s attempt to take these existential realities upon themselves and not lose their sanity. The Blues are not art for art’s sake, music for music’s sake. They are a way of life, a lifestyle of the Black community; and they came into being to give expression to Black identity and the will for survival.”

Escaping from sharecropping and Klan terror, Blacks from the South migrated to New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit. They brought the Adjustment Disorder Blues with them and had Adjustment Disorders adjusting to a new but familiar Northern cities Blues of racism, segregation, lack of jobs, and poor ghetto neighborhoods.

Malcolm X had remarked that ‘Blacks merely went from down south to up south’. Being in a new, unfamiliar overcrowded urban environment, Blacks felt alienated and longed for family and friends down home. Being lonely and in despair many fell into drinking whiskey and using drugs to escape the stress filled depressive realities of the urban Blues.

Professor Cone’s above mentioned point that the Blues has been a way of life for Blacks in America was captured in the ‘Last Poets’ poem entitled ~ ‘True Blues’:

True blues ain’t no new news
‘bout who’s been abused
for the blues is as old as my stolen soul
I sang the Blues when the missionaries came
passing out Bibles in Jesus’ name
I sang the Blues in the hull of the ship
beneath the sting of the slavemaster’s whip
I sang the Blues when the ship anchored the dock
my family being sold on a slave block
I sang the Blues being torn from my first-born
and hung my head and cried
when my wife took his life and then committed suicide
I sang the Blues on the slavemaster’s plantation
helping him build his ‘free’ nation
I sang the Blues in the cotton field
hustlin’ to make the daily yield
I sang the Blues when he forced my woman to bed
Lord knows! I wished he was dead
I sang the Blues on the run
duckin’ the dog and dodging the gun
I sang the Blues hangin’ from the tree
in a desperate attempt to break free
I sang the Blues from sunup to down
cursing the master when he wasn’t around
I sang the Blues in all his wars
dying for some unknown cause
I sang the Blues in a high tone, low moan
loud groan, soft grunt, hard funk!
I sang the Blues on land, sea and air
about who, when, why and where
I sang the Blues in church on Sunday
Slavin’ on Monday
Misused on Tuesday
Abused on Wednesday
Accused on Thursday
Fried alive on Friday
And died on Saturday
Sho’nuff singin’ the blues
I sang the Blues in the summer, fall, winter and spring
I know sho’nuff that the blues is my thing
I sang the backwater blues
Rhythm and blues
Gospel blues
St Louis blues
Crosstown blues
Chicago blues
Mississippi Goddam blues
The Watts blues
Harlem blues
Hough blues
Gutbucket blues
Funky Junkie blues
I sang the Up North Cigarette Cough blues
The Down South Strung Out On The Side Of My Mouth blues
I sang the blues black
I sang the blues blacker
I sang the blues blackest
I sang about my sho’nuff blue blackness

The ‘Blues’ is deeper than a DSM IV definition of depression. The true Black Blues is existential, it is ‘Blues to the Bone’; it is a spiritual ailment from the unrelenting, grinding stress and strain of daily racial oppression from the cradle to the grave; where one is hurt to the core; one’s essence is wounded and in pain; one’s inner vitality is gone - tapped out; the soul has been depleted; one lives but is ‘dead inside’ (zombie), living a suicidal lifestyle wanting to die, expressed graphically by many young Black men today, “I don’t give a fuck, I’m just fucked up, take me out – kill me!”

The historical experience of Adjustment Disorder by Blacks in America has been defined by Dr. Joy DeGruy-Leary as ‘Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome’ (PTSS). DeGruy-Leary states that Blacks have never healed from slavery – the ‘Black Holocaust’. The original enslaved Africans were never treated for their severe trauma. After slavery ended nothing was done to help Black ex-slaves recover from trauma; nor was anything done to treat Blacks re-enslaved by Black Codes during Reconstruction.

For one hundred years (1865 – 1965) of Civil Rights struggle, no measure was put in place to provide mental health services to Blacks who had suffered from Klan terror, lynchings, racist murders, repressive Jim Crow laws, and diabolical Tuskegee Syphilis experiments. Even in the post-Civil Rights era, most Blacks today who suffer from on-going racism, massive poverty and unemployment, homelessness, violence, drugs, and psychological duress don’t receive mental health services.

DeGruy-Leary says that there has never been a period of time when Blacks in America were given the information and opportunity to heal from our racial oppression-based Adjustment Disorder injuries. So the psychopathologies have continued, passed down from generation to generation ~ without Blacks being conscious of its origin, symptoms, and treatments.