Is Racism tied to mental illness?

That's the information covered in a Washington Post article which is linked from RawStory. Unforunately, any time I try to retrieve the article from Rawstory or the Washington Post, I get a page not found.

Favor please. Look at washingtonpost.com and click on the article. If you can get through, can you post a few paragraphs? Thanks.

Because education and enlightenment as well as experience can cure it.

"Mental Illness"...puleeze.

It's a pretty sweeping term, like "salad" or "music." It can apply to a broad range of varieties and degrees.

While I wouldn't say that racism is the same as paranoid schizophrenia in all racists, it can be in some. However, I would also say that racism isn't itself the illness, but a symptom of it.

It just seems backward logic. Although a pill to cure racism would be interesting, it doesn't cure ignorance. Hell if they had one, noone would vote republican now would they?

...we would never find a short line at the store, or the last copy of a movie hiding behind others in the wrong place.

I wonder though, is there any form of racism that isn't irrational? And isn't an irrational belief delusional, especially if it's accepted as truth and acted upon? I think there may be a fine line between unsupported beliefs and insanity.

are you able to get to the article in the Washington post? I think the article may have been pulled.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/09/AR2005120901938.html

Mental health practitioners say they regularly confront extreme forms of racism, homophobia and other prejudice in the course of therapy, and that some patients are disabled by these beliefs. As doctors increasingly weigh the effects of race and culture on mental illness, some are asking whether pathological bias ought to be an official psychiatric diagnosis.

Advocates have circulated draft guidelines and have begun to conduct systematic studies. While the proposal is gaining traction, it is still in the early stages of being considered by the professionals who decide on new diagnoses.

Advocates for the new diagnosis also say most candidates for treatment, such as the man Solomon treated, are not criminals or violent offenders. Rather, they are like the young woman in Los Angeles who thought Jews were diseased and would infect her -- she carried out compulsive cleansing rituals and hit her head to drive away her obsessions. She realized she needed help but was afraid her therapist would be Jewish, said Dunbar, a Los Angeles psychologist who has amassed several case studies and treated several dozen patients for racial paranoia and other forms of what he considers pathological bias.

Another patient was a waiter so hostile to black people that he flung plates on the table when he served black patrons and got fired from multiple jobs.

A third patient was a Vietnam War veteran who was so fearful of Asians that he avoided social situations where he might meet them, Dunbar said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/09/AR2005120901938.html



The 48-year-old man turned down a job because he feared that a co-worker would be gay. He was upset that gay culture was becoming mainstream and blamed most of his personal, professional and emotional problems on the gay and lesbian movement.

These fixations preoccupied him every day. Articles in magazines about gays made him agitated. He confessed that his fears had left him socially isolated and unemployed for years: A recovering alcoholic, the man even avoided 12-step meetings out of fear he might encounter a gay person.



Darrel A. Regier of the American Psychiatric Association favors research but says it is not clear that establishing a diagnosis would be useful. (By Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)
"He had a fixed delusion about the world," said Sondra E. Solomon, a psychologist at the University of Vermont who treated the man for two years. "He felt under attack, he felt threatened."



At the point he is at the person is suffering from delusions of persecution. I hardly doubt every skinhead and clansman suffers from a brain inbalance that causes this. If anything it is reinforced from outside stimuli and has nothing to do with abnormal brain chemistry.

For example:

ignorance or lack of exposure to other groups

low IQ therefore fear of new things and people

cultural conditioning

Most pernicious of all though: perceived advantage in being racist (hobble the competition or if I've already won, keep them down).

It's not hard to imagine various combinations and weights of these in different people.

geez

them because I would realize that it wasn't a permanent condition. Help is on its way.

Self-identified groups find ways of marking their boundaries, think of it as a tribal practice that finds parallels in many other primate species. Forming groups and differentiating ourselves from others is what humans do. I have yet to find a person that doesn't do it; their group may be scattered or compact, or based on ideology and belief (or even profession and education), not race, ethnicity, religion or ideology, speech variety, or obviously acquired cultural traits. You can thank evolution for that. It's not a rational thing, and certainly ties in with the all-too-human need to feel superior and distinct from the masses.

Some do it in more extreme ways than others. And some people can obsess about it; but they can obsess about washing their hands or not letting their potatoes touch their peas. If in-group solidarity and out-group exclusion are evolutionary traits, you'd expect there to be some genetic basis for it, and it may be that there are genetic variants that motivate a person to emphasis group exclusion more than we consider sane. But the same holds for some kinds of violence, too, it seems. Not everything that's conditioned by genetics is necessary ok.

I might venture that those at the other extreme might well be sociopaths: they're in a group of one.