Hate Speech Is Killing Us

Bigotry is both virulent and contagious, causing damage and spreading from person to person, and both victims of bigotry and bigots are harmed

By Ronald Pies, clinical professor of psychiatry

Over a decade ago, I wrote a piece for a psychiatric journal entitled “Is Bigotry a Mental Illness?” At the time, some psychiatrists were advocating making “pathological bigotry” or pathological bias—essentially, bias so extreme it interferes with daily function and reaches near-delusional proportions—an official psychiatric diagnosis. For a variety of medical and scientific reasons, I wound up opposing that position.

In brief, my reasoning was this. Some bigots suffer from mental illness, and some persons with mental illness exhibit bigotry—but that doesn’t mean that bigotry per se is an illness.

Yet in the past few weeks, in light of the hatred and bigotry the nation has witnessed, I have been reconsidering the matter. I’m still not convinced that bigotry is a discrete illness or disease, at least in the medical sense. But I do think there are good reasons to treat bigotry as a public health problem. This means that some of the approaches we take toward controlling the spread of disease may be applicable to pathological bigotry, for example by promoting self-awareness of bigotry and its adverse health consequences.

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Department:

Psychiatry