“Lawlessness.” “Violence.” “Insurrection.”

In the wake of mass protests against federal immigration raids, politicians and pundits are using these kinds of words to discredit public dissent. In this view, protesters are framed not as engaged citizens exercising their rights but as threats to public safety and social order.

Terms like “Trump Derangement Syndrome” go even further by pathologizing dissent itself. Framing resistance as mental instability makes it easier to dismiss, delegitimize, and punish, rather than confront the real harms that sparked it.

But this impulse isn’t new. The reflex to recast resistance as disorder has long been embedded in medicine. Psychiatry, in particular, has a long and troubling history of treating dissent not as a demand for justice, but as a symptom of illness.

As a psychiatrist who has worked across emergency rooms, inpatient units, and community clinics, I’ve seen how our systems can punish people for suffering—especially when anger or resistance stems from trauma, racism, or state violence.

In the mid-19th century, Southern physician Samuel Cartwright coined the term drapetomania to describe what he saw as a mental illness afflicting enslaved people who tried to flee captivity. Rather than recognizing an attempted escape as a fight for freedom, psychiatry labeled it pathological. The proposed treatment? Whipping.

A century later, in the heat of the Civil Rights Movement, Black men protesting racial injustice were labeled as schizophrenic under the so-called diagnosis of protest psychosis. Once viewed as a docile disorder of white middle-class women—one primarily characterized by withdrawal, confusion, and guilt—schizophrenia was redefined, its symptoms rewritten to reflect aggression, hostility, and paranoia. What changed wasn’t the science........

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