Is prejudice a mental illness?

[Joe Republic]

I would lean no, although this (fairly long) article makes for very interesting reading.....


Source

Should bias be treated as a mental illness?
Patients paralyzed by racism, other prejudices confound therapists

By Shankar Vedantam
The Washington Post
Updated: 3:33 a.m. ET Dec. 10, 2005

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.


Click on source link to read the rest of the article

[The Dowager Mod]

No it's learned.

[Joe Republic]

No it's learned.

Perhaps so, but many other clinically defined mental illnesses are also learned.  Some say schizophrenia is at least partially so.

[J-Mann]

No, it's genetically inherent.

[TheresNoMoney]

In a way, it is a mental illness, although I'm not sure it would clearly meet the true definition.

[Jake]

It's the natural outgrowth of a society with large contrasts between groups of people.

[Citizen James]

No.

Though bigotry might be a symptom of another mental illness (say, for example, a schizophrinic who think's he's hitler), bigotry itself is just plain evil.

[CheeseWhiz]

It's the natural outgrowth of a society with large contrasts between groups of people.

^^^^^

[MasterJedi]

No

[Virginian87]

Not at all.

[Rin-chan]

No it's learned.

Perhaps so, but many other clinically defined mental illnesses are also learned.  Some say schizophrenia is at least partially so.

People are predisposed to schizophrenia and an event happens in their love that allows that part of them to be released.  Without the genetic component, it could not exist.  Therefore, it is not learned.  It is more of a latent illness waiting to strike; it may surface, it may not.  It is a psychosomatic illness, an illness of the mind on the body.

Prejudice, though, is a learned trait.  Small children will go up to anyone and  hug them and say hello.  It is the parents and society that dictate how a child reacts to strangers and people who appear different than them.  This is what determines prejudice.  Nurture, not nature.

Rin-chan

[dazzleman]

I voted no, but in extreme cases it could be.

It's one thing to, as an example, avoid black neighborhoods after dark for fear of crime.  That is not mental illness, but self-preservation with a certain degree of prejudice that comes from life experience.

But if you truly hate people you don't know because of their ethnic background, then I would say that definitely could be mental illness.

So I think it's a matter of degree and form.