The role of race and social class in the psychiatric disorders of treated narcotic addicts.

To test a clinical impression that lower-class Black narcotic addicts from a ghetto "welfare" setting primarily manifest reactive schizophrenia when they become mentally ill, whereas White lower-middle- or working-class addicts primarily manifest reactive depression when they become neurotic or psychotic, a series of 20 consecutive mentally ill addicts from each group were compared with respect to diagnosis. The two groups were matched for age and sex. The findings overwhelmingly supported the hypothesis and are interpreted as confirming it insofar as the nature of our two populations permitted. It was impossible, for example, to separate the effects of racial membership from those of social class or from an interaction between the two variables.