Psychiatry Ponders Whether Extreme Bias Can Be an Illness

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.

"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."

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.

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

Hell, I could save them a ton of money on research. YES! It's a mental illness. So lock the bigoted fuckers up and let the rest of us go on with our lives.

"YES! It's a mental illness. So lock the bigoted fuckers up and let the rest of us go on with our lives."

"He confessed that his fears had left him socially isolated <...>" -- How is locking someone up a solution in this case?

If we begin locking people up on the grounds that they are prejudiced, will we eventually lock up people who are deemed to be "politically insane"?

I think bigotry like that borders on paranoia.

Talking of psychotics whose symptoms are extreme bigotry, hatred, fear, that one was a prime example.

I agree it is certainly a mental illness. However, won't locking them up just kinda... you know... create a slippery slope? Not that I am REALLY opposed to the idea, mind you, I like the idea of locking bigots up.

I guess the questions I have to ask are:
1. Can they become dangerous to society?
2. Can they become a danger to themselves?
3. Can they be rehabilitated?

We do seem to be hardwired to sort things and people into different groups. This is one of the roots of prejudice, as it is the core of the "us vs. them" mentality. Some suggest that we are even hardwired to be prejudiced, to blame our problems on "them" (whichever "them" our brains decide is/are) the culprit). My personal opinion is that teaching (by parents, teachers, peers, the media and the community) has a much bigger role in this than any hardwiring.

Think about it. From birth we are exposed to thousands of messages from people and the media. Our parents tell us who to associate with and who to avoid, in the process instilling their prejudices to us. We may be taken to Church, where we may be told that gay people are abominations who deserve to die. Television floods us with images of black people who are thugs, so we may grow up thinking that this is how all black people are. Perhaps our father is virulently anti-semitic and longs for the day that all Jewish people would be deported from America.

As we grow older and move into young adulthood we may join groups that allow us to foster the biases that were impressed upon us in our youth. We join a strict fundamentalist Church and partcipate in rallies to denounce the sin of homosexuality. Or perhaps we become a member of Aryan Nation or the Skin Heads. Whatever we do, we cultivate the hatred we have, and even pass it on to others.

There is a strong element of fear here as well. It is bred into us, and carefully nurtured--first by the person who put it there, and later by ourselves. Fear is an exquisite breeder of hate, for people who fear for their safety, their livelihood, their family, their lives, will go to great lengths to protect it. They will donate time, money and effort to be sure. And in some cases they will even commit acts of great evil such as destroying property or attacking/killing people.



So is it a mental illness? It probably could qualify as a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, one of the personality disorders. If the person is so engaged in their ideas and behaviors that they can't live a normal life they definitely need some form of intervention, and if they pose a danger to themselves or others they need to be taken off the streets.