Breaking

The Legal Implications of the Debate Over Whether ‘Extreme Racism’ Is a Mental Illness
Dec 02, 2022 3 mins, 57 secs
When the trial begins, a respected Black psychiatrist takes the stand to present his idea that the defendant suffers from “extreme racism,” a mental illness.

While he never brought his ideas to the witness stand inside the New York City courthouse behind those massive stone steps that Law & Order made famous, in 1999 he shared his theories on the link between mental health and extreme forms of bigotry on the op-ed pages of the New York Times.

But even now, after nearly a decade during which the number of hate crimes has steadily increased, the question of the relationship between bigotry and mental illness has never fully been resolved.

The racist attack at a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket, for which the gunman pleaded guilty this week to state murder and domestic terrorism charges, prompted calls for the country to “get serious about mental health” as well as pleas not to talk about the shooting as a matter of psychiatric illness rather than a racist hate crime.

It’s hard to distinguish what psychiatric experts have decided not to define, to separate what Poussaint calls “everyday racism”—covering the span from systemic discrimination to microaggressions—from the extreme version, which he and others have described as the point at which bigotry so deeply shapes behavior that a person struggles to function and sometimes becomes dangerous.

If extreme racism were to become accepted as a mental illness per se, more suspects in hate-crime cases could potentially have recourse to mount “insanity” defenses in court.

And given all the mass shootings and disturbing public events in which extreme racism appears to have played some part since Poussaint first described his ideas, it’s also hard not to wonder?

And even rarer—though not unheard of—is an attempt to use racism or other bigotry as an indicator of mental-health challenges, he says.

“I think it would be extremely hard,” says Boucai, “I mean extremely hard, to succeed on the theory that extreme racism per se—particularly subscription to a theory—is a mental illness for the purpose of criminal responsibility.

Some experts fear that shifting the conversation to questions of mental health can also draw attention away from hateful ideas embraced by the person accused of the crime—ideas that are today often shared by people, including public figures, whose mental health is not questioned.

“One of the detriments of trying to look at racism as a form of psychopathology or mental illness is that it makes that [illness] abhorrent, as if everything else is working in a certain [non-racist] way.”.

While racism can influence one’s mental health, describing racism itself—even “extreme racism”—as a mental illness implies that bigotry exists beyond our individual and collective control.

In 1999, when Poussaint wrote his op-ed advocating for increased research into possible psychiatric treatments for extreme racism, he was the author of acclaimed books about the effects of racism on Black mental health and a veteran of public controversy.

To Poussaint, this story signaled a growing threat posed by a failure to recognize that, while highlighting and combating systemic racism is important in preventing discrimination, so is identifying and helping individuals motivated by bigotry who might go so far as to injure or kill others.

When the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the guide that mental-health professionals use to make their diagnoses, was published in 1980, clinicians like Poussaint considered racism—not extreme racism, but what he calls everyday racism—a potential symptom of several conditions, from paranoid personality disorder to generalized anxiety disorder.

Racism alone is not sufficient to diagnose a patient with one of those conditions, but an extreme racist, Poussaint says, likely suffers from delusions.

Poussaint was not the first person to raise the idea that extreme racism is itself a mental illness.

That’s a point Poussaint says he doesn’t oppose, at least when it comes to everyday racism.

“The American Psychiatric Association has been focusing on this in the DSM by identifying and addressing the impact of structural racism on the over- or underdiagnosis of mental disorders in certain ethno-racial groups

I ask Poussaint what he thinks might have happened if extreme racism had become its own diagnosable condition listed in the DSM

Extreme racism might have been a topic on talk shows and a more frequent topic of news coverage, he says

“We’d get away from treating it as if [extreme racism] is normative,” Poussaint says, “like a cultural difference because America is a racist country

RECENT NEWS

SUBSCRIBE

Get monthly updates and free resources.

CONNECT WITH US

© Copyright 2024 365NEWSX - All RIGHTS RESERVED