Oh, man, doesn't this explain a whole lot (emphasis added):
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.
Gee, does the above sound like anyone you know? So we're not being snarky; they really are all just fucking nuts after all.
3 comments:
Wow...goes to show how deep this stuff runs. I mean, my first instinct was to dismiss it with a flippant comment about the guy in this excerpt being in denial about what he really wants. But really I think it should be a wake-up call for the rest of us to take a good, hard look around us. I don't think psychologizing and thereby privatizing the issue is a solution, particularly, but rather it should lead to scrutiny of the institutional and cultural realities that push a few people to internalize oppressive belief structures so dramatically and obsessively, and the rest of us to internalize them (even those of us who try to struggle against said oppressions) in much more socially acceptable, and therefore invisible, ways.
The psychiatrists are describing the kind of guy who perpetrated the Montreal Massacre -- someone who blames another group for all his problems. And yes, I would support the idea that such hatred is a pathology. On Americablog, when they were discussing this, some people said that seeing bigotry as a mental illness would somehow let people off the hook. But seeing alchoholism as an illness doesn't mean that people who drink and drive get a free pass. Rather, I think the mental illness frame puts the responsibility squarely on the bigot to be responsible for his own behaviour, rather than blaming their bigotry on the behaviour of the group they hate ("oh, those gays, if only they weren't so FLAMING" and the like)
Well, I suppose I can see pros and cons to the mental illness frame, but the biggest potential con is its ability to make racism or homophobia a problem of "them" -- those with the most obsessive internalization of the oppression, who are therefore psychiatrized -- rather than all of us who have been socialized in an oppressive society and therefore have a responsibility to work on both ourselves and our society to create change. I'm fine about not letting the most severe examples off the hook, so long as doing so doesn't let the rest of us off the hook either.
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