Racism, prejudice, and mental illness

Cleaning up a stack of notes.

Last year, Clayton Cramer looked at a move on the part of the American Psychological Association to remove various sexual disorders from the DSM. (Homosexuality is already gone, at least if you're content with it.)

Among the mental illnesses being debated in the symposium at the APA's annual convention were all the paraphilias--which include pedophilia, exhibitionism, fetishism, transvestism, voyeurism, and sadomasochism.

Now, in a move he compares with the Soviet Encyclopedia – whenever an article was removed, something else had to be put in its place, a sort of conservation of page count effect, I suppose – he sees the APA advocating the addition of new kinds of kinky behavior to the DSM.

...continued in full post...

In any case, if the psychiatric profession wants to start removing from the definition of mental illness every weird little behavior that a majority doesn't like, then why are there psychiatrists proposing to add some new kinky behavior to the list? Once you see what the kinky behavior is, you won't be surprised:

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.
<snip>
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.

If DSM left it at those prejudices or biases that interfered with a person's daily life, I suppose that I wouldn't disagree that this is a significant emotional problem. I just have my suspicions that a vote at an APA convention would expand the definition of a "serious bias problem" to include the 60% of the population that does not approve of homosexuality.

Given which movie won "Best Picture" at the Oscars, this topic is again timely:

Here's a quote from the article that almost reads like someone wanted a real world example of "projection" (the tendency of a person with a serious problem to project it onto everyone else):

"I don't think racism is a mental illness, and that's because 100 percent of people are racist," said Paul J. Fink, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association. "If you have a diagnostic category that fits 100 percent of people, it's not a diagnostic category."

Cramer looks at different types of prejudice, identifying three levels:

1. A person who hates or fears all members of group X--no exceptions. I don't know that I have ever met someone like this about race or ethnicity--although I know that such people exist. I have met people who hate or fear all gay men--and in every case, these were men who were sexually abused as children. (These are guys who think of me as a flaming liberal about homosexuality.)

2. A person who believes that members of group X have certain characteristics in common--but recognizes that there are exceptional individual members of race X: hence, "you are a credit to your race." There was a time when people actually said that--now it is only used as a comic line in fiction to discredit a character.

3. A person who believes that members of group X are more likely to have certain qualities or defects than the general population. This belief exists in an unadulterated positive form, "Asians sure are good at math!" It also exists in a positive form with a dark implication, "Jews sure are clever!" (implying that perhaps the intelligence is being used for nefarious purposes). There is also the negative form. "Blacks are violent." "Men are violent."

In his analysis, it may be worth defining prejudice type 1 as a mental disorder, but he doesn't trust the APA to refrain from similarly defining types 2 and 3.