"Vacaville - American Headquarters for Medical Genocide" was a story published in the Black Panther newspaper in June 26, 1971 which detailed the medical and legal abuses that occurred at the Vacaville Medical Center which was a part of the California state prison system. This article brought to light the drug and dosage experiments being performed on Vacaville patients that often had disabling effects. The individuals held at Vacaville were placed there because they were considered discipline problems at other penal institutions. The article in the Black Panther newspaper argued that drug testing was used as a means of control against activists who protest the oppression they face both inside and outside incarcertation.

"Vacaville - American Headquarters for Medical Genocide"

In 1976, the Black Panther published several letters to the editor that provided direct statements from Black individuals being held in psychiatric institutions. During 1976, the Black Panther also published two articles providing state and federal legal context for the claims of those being held in psychiatric institutions. One of the two context articles explains a proposed California state bill that would mandate the right to refuse psychiatric medication, psychosurgery and other "psycho-organic procedures." The other article reported on the congressional National Commission for the Protection of Human Biomedical Behavioral Research's decision that allowed the continued use of psychosurgery as an experimental research procedure.

These articles represent the BPP awareness and promotion of political anti-psychiatry work on the macro-level, along with Mad pride and other consumer/survivor/ex-patient movements that attended to the microlevel experiences of individuals.

Letters to the Editor published in the Black Panther

Schalk notes that we should not merely read the connections drawn by the Black Panther newspaper and articles between prisons and psychiatric facilities as oppression analogies and rather, it is important to see that the Panthers understood race, disability, prisons, and psychiatric institutions as inextricably linked - this is also why we see less language around these intuitions being ableist and more around them being generally oppressive.

BPP Resistance to the Psychiatric Industrial Complex through Consciousness Raising 

1) "Vacaville - America's Headquarters for Medical Genocide"
2) January 24, 1976 Letter to the Editor
3) May 1, 1976 Letter to the Editor

University of Wisconsin - Madison

1. "Principles of Radical Psychiatry" by Claude Steiner
2. Connections between Prison and Mental Institutions

How the Fight Against Psychiatric Abuse fit into Larger BPP Ideology

Schalk, Sami. Black Disability Politics, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478027003

Black Disability Politics

Steiner, a white author and founder of radical psychiatry, asserts that "psychiatry is a political activity" because the influence psychiatrists have over the lives in which they intervene. Steiner holds that psychiatry and psychiatrists cannot be neutral objective forces because of the position of power they hold over their patients and that it is these false claims of neutrality that lead to marginalized people avoiding psychiatric services. Steiner then states that a radical psychiatrist should advocate for the side of those whom they are helping and not look for the wrongness in the person and will take the ways someone is being oppressed into account when assessing their mental health. 

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