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Should bias be treated as a mental illness?

This topic can be found at:
https://shalomplace.org/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/10210765/m/18510295

10 December 2005, 06:14 AM
Eric
Should bias be treated as a mental illness?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10389484/

"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."............
10 December 2005, 01:03 PM
Brad
Should bias be treated as a mental illness?

Only if those doing the diagnoses are without bias. Only if political, social, and other opinions can be as rationally, logically, and assuredly arrived at as scientific principles so that there can be no doubt about what is a bias and what is just a difference of opinion. Now, certainly one might need treatment for repressed anger and such. But to shift attention to the actual views (biases) that one may use to express that repressed anger is to pervert science, to pervert the profession of psychology. It would simply be another way for the left to try to criminalize, euthanize, or otherwise de-legitimize opinions that they don't agree with.
10 December 2005, 04:06 PM
spoonboy
I would consider myself a "recovering right-winger".
It comes up again and again in my twelve step program and I still hang out with stockbrokers, ex-military personnel and people who grew up very white and suburban as I did. That's the culture I know. I still have a fear of non-Christians, as though it is my responsibility to convert them. I have hit many bottoms in this area, but have learned
to appreciate other points of view. Had a lesbian liberal sitting on my lap the other day, and I force myself to read people like Andrew Harvey.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Harvey Frowner Smiler
10 December 2005, 05:06 PM
spoonboy
I haven't really felt as though I had permission to
bring this up before, but now seems to be a good time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...High_School_massacre

I remember this well, since my first sponsor's wife
was locked in a walk-in refrigerator with other frightened indiviuals for hours, I knew a freind of one of the shooter's mothers, and a therapist and counselor at a neighboring high school, who assisted some really frightened teenagers. The pastor of the church I was attending at the time,
a very nice man who adopted a Chinese orphan girl
and was the first civilian moral chaplain at the
Air Force Academy at the time, was all over national television and all around town speaking
of the breakdown of morals and spirituality, the secular culture, etc. (Round up the usual suspects!) Wink

The other side of the argument said that the bourgeois values of affluent upper-middle-class
suburbans was to blame. (Round up the usual suspects!) Wink

How about both sides being partially right, but being bound up in the false self and their various
control paradigm interperetations, often might contribute to the very social ills they are desiring and conspiring to ameliorate?

What would be the God's Eye View, and how do we get there from here? Now that's the $64,000 question, isn't it?

no_more_columbine_massacres.org
10 December 2005, 09:49 PM
Eric
What I gathered from the article was that if you are not with mainstream views you have a mental disorder. What's wrong with this study????
10 December 2005, 10:11 PM
spoonboy
Define mainstream. "Normal" is a setting on the dryer.
10 December 2005, 10:23 PM
Eric
I mean extremely liberal views that have no hint of conservatism to them. I mean from a moral and ethical standpoint not necessarily a political one. Which is actually hard to separate these days.

For instance if I disagree with homosexual marriage. Would this make me a sociopath? Even If I had no opinion on individual relationships only if it applied to society in whole?

Who can draw the line between morals/paradigms/discrimination?

It sounds like another form of labeling to me....