Politics and psychiatry are unlikely bedfellows, but in the 20th century they became quite cozy.
Sometimes that came in a more benign form, like providing fodder for catty magazine articles. In 1964, Fact magazine published the opinions of several licensed psychiatrists who testified in large part that the Republican candidate of that year’s election, Barry Goldwater, was mentally ill. Some described him as suffering from “chronic psychosis” while others declared, “Goldwater has the same pathological makeup as Hitler, Castro, Stalin, and other known schizophrenic leaders.” The fiasco led the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to put in place the “Goldwater Rule,” forbidding members from publicly opining on the mental health of prominent figures.
In other cases, the link between the political establishment and the discipline of psychiatry was a bit darker. In the Soviet Union, for example, dissidents against the regime were often diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia.” Psychiatrists used the “antisocial” and “pessimistic” outlook of some political opponents of communism, plus their tendency to be in conflict with authority to diagnose them, ipso facto, as mentally ill. After all, why not? Marxism-Leninism was a brute fact, and any disagreement could only come from a broken mind, so the KGB surely reasoned.
Phobias are serious physical and/or psychological conditions that can leave people mentally debilitated and unable to live a normal life. People suffering severe hydrophobia, for example, are afraid of letting a cup of water touch their lips or taking a bath. Individuals with agoraphobia may not be able to bring themselves to ride in a car, or use public transportation, or leave their home, or even a room within their home. Why, then, do we trivialize these very serious psychological conditions by rendering everything a “phobia,” and nearly everyone a “phobic.”
In times gone by, “xenophobia,” for example, meant “irrational fear and/or hatred of foreigners.” Someone who was xenophobic would, for example, fear that Irish and Italian immigrants would establish a Catholic theocracy in America or that Mexican seasonal laborers would pillage and despoil the southern border. But today, merely voicing an opposition to lax immigration on the basis of economics, or cultural preservation, or any other legitimate concern is dismissed as “xenophobic.”
Likewise, the terms “homophobia” and “transphobia,” while literally meaning prejudice or hatred towards people who identify as LGBT has, nevertheless, ballooned out to encompass basically any dissent from the reigning orthodoxy on questions of gender and sexuality. There are many people, for example, religious minorities, who don’t wish LGBT people harm but nevertheless disagree with them on issues related to sexuality and gender. That is not to say violence and discrimination towards the LGBT community doesn’t exist, isn’t endemic and isn’t deeply immoral, but it is to say that people can disagree about thorny cultural issues without being considered “phobic.”
The real harm in the politicization of phobias is that it leads to a total breakdown of reasoned discourse. As a 2020 paper on the topic of phobias in politics argues, “science and politics today constitute deeply intertwined spheres of discourse and practice, as is evident…from the representation of prejudice as illness.” Mental illnesses are, by and large, not “reasoned away” but “treated” by a combination of drugs and therapy. The weight and objectivity of science is used (by both sides of any given debate, usually) as a cudgel to beat one’s ideological opponents. It produces, on a wide range of political issues, an impetus for categorizing one’s enemies as beyond the pale of reasoned discourse, suffering of “sluggish schizophrenia” perhaps.
For the sake of good-faith political discourse, the field of psychiatry and freedom of thought, we should seek to end the rapid politicization of the term “phobia” and mental illness in general. You may find some people’s positions on difficult political and cultural issues to be deeply immoral, even evil, but they aren’t mentally ill. They just think differently than you.
Image Credit / ‘A Rake’s Progress’ 1733 | William Hogarth
