🗝️Sanity Classics: Everything sick and bigoted is not a 'mental illness'
But it could be similar to a contagion and a public health challenge.
You know what sickens me? That some people think like that. What about you?
Content warning
Discrimination, violence
Over half a century ago, following a spate of racist killings in the civil rights era, a group of Black psychiatrists asked the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to declare extreme bigotry a form of mental disorder.
Their petition was rejected. The reason: Racism is so widespread in society that it is the norm, not a disorder or an aberration. It is a cultural problem, not a psychopathological one.
But the debate didn't end there. In the early 2000s, the push to designate 'pathological bias' a mental illness acquired renewed momentum, as mental health practitioners said they regularly confronted extreme forms of racism, homophobia, and other kinds of prejudice in their patients, and that some patients were disabled by their distorted beliefs.
There was the 48-year-old man who felt so threatened by homosexuality that he turned down a job lest he end up working with a colleague who could be gay. And the young woman 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."
