Jonathan M. Metzl is an acclaimed physician and sociologist who speaks, teaches, and writes on a range of topics, including mental illness and gun violence, race and whiteness in America, health and health care, and diversity and structural competency in higher education. He is the author of the groundbreaking book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland, which provides an in-depth look at why so many working-class white Americans support politicians whose policies are literally killing them.
Currently, Metzl is the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry, and the director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He received his MD from the University of Missouri, MA in humanities/poetics and psychiatric internship/residency from Stanford University, and PhD in American culture from University of Michigan. He is the winner of the 2020 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Book Award, the 2020 APA Benjamin Rush Award for Scholarship, and a 2010 Guggenheim fellowship.
Being a gun violence expert, professor, and psychiatrist is a unique combination that allows Metzl to speak and write about gun violence in America, and in particular to address stereotypes that link guns with race or mental illness, or that blame mental illness for mass shootings and other gun crimes. The topic is the focus of Metzl’s most recent book, What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms, a New York Times Editor’s Choice. By looking at a racially charged mass shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, What We’ve Become reexamines how we as a nation should address gun violence. His other books include The Protest Psychosis, Prozac on the Couch, and Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality.