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Extreme Racism is a Mental Illness;Extreme racism indicates psychopathology
Yes
It can be a delusional symptom of psychotic disorders
Alvin F Poussaint, Professor of psychiatry1
1 Harvard Medical School and Judge Baker Children's Center 3 Blackfan Circle Boston, MA 02115
ude.dravrah.ccbj@tniassuop_nivla
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Copyright © Copyright 2002 BMJ publishing Group
The American Psychiatric Association has never officially recognized extreme racism (as opposed to ordinary prejudice) as a mental health problem, although the issue was raised more than 30 years ago. After several racist killings in the civil rights era, a group of black psychiatrists sought to have extreme bigotry classified as a mental disorder. The association's officials rejected the recommendation, arguing that because so many Americans are racist, even extreme racism in this country is normative—a cultural problem rather than an indication of psychopathology.
The psychiatric profession's primary index for diagnosing psychiatric symptoms, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), does not include racism, prejudice, or bigotry in its text or index.1 Therefore, there is currently no support for including extreme racism under any diagnostic category. This leads psychiatrists to think that it cannot and should not be treated in their patients.
To continue perceiving extreme racism as normative and not pathologic is to lend it legitimacy. Clearly, anyone who scapegoats a whole group of people and seeks to eliminate them to resolve his or her internal conflicts meets criteria for a delusional disorder, a major psychiatric illness.
Extreme racists' violence should be considered in the context of behavior described by Allport in The Nature of Prejudice.2 Allport's 5-point scale categorizes increasingly dangerous acts. It begins with verbal expression of antagonism, progresses to avoidance of members of disliked groups, then to active discrimination against them, to physical attack, and finally to extermination (lynchings, massacres, genocide). That fifth point on the scale, the acting out of extermination fantasies, is readily classifiable as delusional behavior.
More recently, Sullaway and Dunbar used a prejudice rating scale to assess and describe levels of prejudice.3 They found associations between highly prejudiced people and other indicators of psychopathology. The subtype at the extreme end of their scale is a paranoid/delusional prejudice disorder.
Using the DSM's structure of diagnostic criteria for delusional disorder,4(p329) I suggest the following subtype:Prejudice type: A delusion whose theme is that a group of individuals, who share a defining characteristic, in one's environment have a particular and unusual significance. These delusions are usually of a negative or pejorative nature, but also may be grandiose in content. When these delusions are extreme, the person may act out by attempting to harm, and even murder, members of the despised group(s).
Extreme racist delusions can also occur as a major symptom in other psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Persons suffering delusions usually have serious social dysfunction that impairs their ability to work with others and maintain employment.
As a clinical psychiatrist, I have treated several patients who projected their own unacceptable behavior and fears onto ethnic minorities, scapegoating them for society's problems. Their strong racist feelings, which were tied to fixed belief systems impervious to reality checks, were symptoms of serious mental dysfunction. When these patients became more aware of their own problems, they grew less paranoid—and less prejudiced.
It is time for the American Psychiatric Association to designate extreme racism as a mental health problem by recognizing it as a delusional psychotic symptom. Persons afflicted with such psychopathology represent an immediate danger to themselves and others. Clinicians need guidelines for recognizing delusional racism in all its forms so that they can provide appropriate treatment. Otherwise, extreme delusional racists will continue to fall through the cracks of the mental health system, and we can expect more of them to explode and act out their deadly delusions.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...-13f1_T1OT.gifFigure 1
Extreme racism indicates psychopathology
Competing interests: None declared
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References
1. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 4th edition. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press; 2000.
2. Allport G. The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley; 1954.
3. Sullaway M, Dunbar E. Clinical manifestations of prejudice in psychotherapy: toward a strategy of assessment and treatment. Clin Psychol Sci Pract 1996;3: 296-309.
4. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic criteria for 297.1 delusional disorder. In: DSM-IV-TR: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press; 2000.
Articles from The Western Journal of Medicine are provided here courtesy of BMJ Group
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071634/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071634/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071634/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071634/
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Re: Extreme Racism is a Mental Illness;Extreme racism indicates psychopathology
Re: Extreme Racism is a Mental Illness;Extreme racism indicates psychopathology
For some reason I think Natina enjoys fanning the flames of racism, hey, I'll bite.
I think I look at racism like I look at police driving around with guns, you get used to it.
Telling Whites to stop being racist is like telling Blacks to stop looting the CVS store. You can put racism through the washer and dryer 100 times, and it still comes out stained. I think Obama in kind of like Lincoln, Abe freed the slaves but he also wanted to send all the blacks back to Africa. Obama wants to make being black in America a great thing, but he also wants them to attend four years of college. Ignorance is everybody's enemy.
But hey, we're here to have fun, right?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXLz7IHxJgo
Re: Extreme Racism is a Mental Illness;Extreme racism indicates psychopathology
'Race' is a phoney concept invented to justify lordship by one group of people over another according to 'natural laws', one of the unfortunate by-products of the theory of evolution and modern science even though 'Race' has no basis in science as a fact. It is time to put this drivel to bed and to value people for the good they bring to society on the basis of law and order, culture and memory, and all things in life that we value. To do so puts faith in, and indeed, restores to humanity the essential dignity we have a right to demand from each other, for the alternative is barbarism and violence, loathing and hate, and no good ever came of that.
Extract 1:
Thus, beginning in the middle of the 19th century all aspects of legal right, feeling, justice, treaty, compromise, settlement, conciliation, arbitration-the essential components of political society-were eclipsed by a doctrine of natural forces. The priorities now were biological necessity and managerial efficiency. It was not a big step from there to the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps.
Extract 2:
Race and ethnicity are phenomena invented in very recent times. As we have seen, the appellation race was not adopted until the 14th century, and did not come to have its modern connotation until the late 18th century. It was only after 1813 that race and ethnicity became organizing ideas of real significance. The 18th- and 19th-century ideologies of self-determination spawned the idea that a nation can be legitimate only if it is comprised of peoples who are ethnically or racially compatible, and that a state can be a state only if it succors the binding idea of kith and kin in nation and race. Such an idea is anathema to the concept of the political state comprised of good citizens living in a community under the rule of law, and it is folly to believe that reliance upon any aspect of its pernicious doctrine will release us from its bondage.
Both from a short article called The Idiocy of Race, by Ivan Hannaford, in the link here:
http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/s...Article_01.pdf
See also an extended treatment of this argument in the book published shortly before his death: Race, the History of an Idea in the West (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996).
