How I Know White People are Crazy and Other Stories

This clinical psychologist is frustrated.

In the final stretch of his doctoral internship, Dr. Jonathan Mathias Lassiter had just one more milestone to complete: the diversity project, where candidates insert themselves into a situation in which they’d experience what it’s like to be a minority and then share their experience with the class. Surprisingly, the all-white training committee failed him! They concluded that the program’s first and only Black intern did not understand diversity. Frustrated and panicked, he thought: “These white people are crazy.”

In How I Know White People Are Crazy and Other Stories, Dr. Lassiter pulls back the curtain on the mental health system and reveals the hurdles that Black psychologists and students are forced to endure in the field. He tackles how white ideology has harmed Black patients and how it dominates America’s mental health practices.

He takes us through the arduous process of traveling across the country to get a job as a Black gay man, and working as a psychologist under culturally insensitive supervisors. As a professor, he’s isolated as the only Black man in his department, and when he starts to incorporate race theory into the curriculum, his colleagues delegitimize these cultural underpinnings. They’re fully confused when he introduces concepts like “African-centered psychology.”  He grows more frustrated with the exclusive talk of Sigmund Freud, and the narrowness of psychology study, with no one like him to vent to. All this takes a mental and physical toll on him.

Using his expertise in research, his own therapy, and keeping a healthy dose of hip-hop/R&B music in his ears, Dr. Lassiter discovered a way where we can center culture in our healing. He demands that our lived and cultural experiences as people of color, LGBTQ+ and disabled communities are made apart of psychology practices so that we can understand, live in and navigate this frustrating world.

A thought provoking, funny and searing indictment of the mental health system for patients, students, and professionals alike will leave you thinking differently about the psychologists in your life.