In this talk, I reflect on the experiences of Tigo, a Black Jamaican man living with psychosis in London, England. He is one of many Black Caribbeans who have been disproportionately diagnosed with psychotic disorders since the 1950s. Tigo believes this is due to the clash between Black Caribbean cultural values and British assimilation practices, which reinforce anti-Black stereotypes and involve the surveillance and hyper-policing of Black Caribbean communities. According to Tigo, it is as if Black Caribbean living conditions in London, shaped by poverty, police brutality, and cultural assimilation, are schizophrenogenic. At the same time, economic precarity in the Caribbean drives many to migrate. Consequently, Black Caribbean migrants are more likely to become psychotic. Tigo’s journey illustrates how psychotic Black Caribbeans feel exiled and are faced with the specter of death, which Frantz Fanon asserts is a structuring fact of Black existence. However, Tigo emphasizes three pivotal moments of heightened insight that inspired him to develop innovative ideas, which made his Black existence more “livable.” I refer to these moments as “the fertile moments” of Tigo’s psychosis.

Jaleel Mashaul Plummer is a PhD Candidate in the Joint PhD Program in Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco. He conducts ethnographic research with Black Jamaicans in England and Jamaica. His research centers around questions of madness, Blackness, Jamaican aesthetics, and Black Jamaican spiritual traditions that concern “postcolonial occupation”. Titled “The Noose of Existence: Blackness and Madness in England and Jamaica”, his dissertation combines comparative ethnography and critical theory to investigate how Black Jamaican experiences with madness and anti-blackness are marked by social alienation and result in self-fragmentation. The dissertation conveys how this alienation and self-fragmentation are many effects of a persistent British colonial occupation of Jamaican social and psychic life in England and Jamaica. However, these two phenomena that deeply affect Black Jamaicans with psychosis are present in the artistic work of Brother Everald Brown, Errol McKenzie, and other artists known as the “Intuitives”. Through their aesthetic creations, the Intuitives propagate the political and religious saliences of maddening landscapes wrought with anti-black violence that become breeding grounds of alienation and self-fragmentation. Therefore, the dissertation demonstrates how Black madness and Intuitive aesthetic creations serve as “mediums” through which we can understand how the lived experience of Black Jamaicans is a struggle with and from the (after)shocks of British colonialism.