Psychiatry Ponders Whether Extreme Bias Can Be an Illness
The article begins with a few examples: a recovering alcoholic who won't attend 12-step meetings for fear of encountering a gay person, a waiter who is hostile to black people, a Vietnam veteran who is afraid of Asians, and a woman who thought Jews were diseased and would infect her so she wouldn't see a therapist for her OCD problem for fear that her therapist would be Jewish.
It's hard to tell from the summaries but I would suggest that it's likely that the prejudice is a symptom of a disorder rather than a separate disorder in and of itself. It also seems to be taking the focus away from the person suffering whatever delusions or paranoia that result in the prejudice and putting too much emphasis on the object of the bias. Dislike of a group of people may cause more problems in daily life than an extreme fear of spiders but should the treatment really be that different? If the problem is an unreasonable fear or irrational belief, that is what should be treated. The object of fear is irrelevant.
I wonder if psychiatrists will ever ponder whether it's a disorder to classify as an illness all behavior that doesn't agree with the latest politically correct thought.
Posted by marybeth at December 10, 2005 09:17 PM Science