Jonathan Metzl MD, PhD, is an acclaimed physician, psychiatrist, and sociologist who speaks and writes on a range of topics including mental illness and gun violence, with a particular focus on gender and race. 

He is the author of the groundbreaking new book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. A New York Times bestseller and named one of the most anticipated books of 2019 by Esquire and the Boston Globe, the book is an in-depth look at why so many working-class white Americans support politicians whose policies are literally killing them.

Dr. Metzl’s quest to understand the health implications of “backlash governance” led him across America’s heartland where he interviewed a range of everyday Americans. He examined how racial resentment fueled pro-gun laws in Missouri, resistance to the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. And he shows these policies’ costs: increasing deaths by gun suicide, rising dropout rates, and falling life expectancies. White Americans, Dr. Metzl argues, must reject the racial hierarchies that promise to aid them but in fact lead our nation to demise.

Dr. Metzl is the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry, and the Director of the Center for 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, A 2008 Guggenheim fellow, Professor Metzl has written extensively for medical, psychiatric, and popular publications and appears regularly on television and radio.

His other books include The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease, Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs, and Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality.