Ignorance, Mental Health, and Gay Cooties

Marko had a bit of a brouhaha over at his place, in a post about gun rights and gays. One of his commenters said:

I personally believe that homosexuality is a mental illness. I break with the church, it is no more a ‘sin’ than any other mental diso rder. There is ample evidence to support that if you have the guts to look for it and see it for what it is.

I'm afraid that this comment made me somewhat cross, and I replied with somewhat more heat than I usually like to. Having slept on the matter, this still bothers me, and so I'm going to elaborate (hopefully in a more temperate manner than last night).

Before I start, a couple of bits of background:

1. This isn't about Gay Rights/Gay Cooties/whatever. Marko certainly doesn't need my feeble help here, and speaks quite eloquently on the point. As I've said before, I quite frankly don't care if someone's gay, and if Jim and Bob want to run off to Provincetown to tie the knot, then I wish them - like any other newly married couple - much happiness together. I know that some folks think different, and that's OK with me, too; I put on my Big Boy Britches this morning, and sometimes we just have to agree to disagree. This post isn't intended to convince anyone that I'm "right" and they're "wrong".

2. One of the least attractive traits of the Intellectual Left is to sneer at people who hold different ideas as being "ignorant". I'm about as well educated as they come, and I get this all the time - and mostly from people who I quite frankly think are not as smart as I am. It's annoying.

That said, Marko's commenter is ignorant. Not in a calling-names sense, but in a clinical sense: he does not understand what he is saying. The label applies to him in a way that it does not apply to someone whose opinion comes from the Bible says it; I believe it; that settles it. No ignorance involved there, although we'll have to agree to disagree.

Ignorant.

There are all sorts of mental illnesses, all across a spectrum. At one end are those we can term the "walking wounded" - typically functional but unhappy souls that are too often the butt of jokes. The Jack and 'Zac Cocktail: a Prozac with a Jack Daniels chaser. Some of these folks are probably mis-diagnosed: it's not surprising that (e.g.) someone who's lost a job, getting a divorce, and whose house is being forclosed is not a happy person. People in this category will not be cured with a pill, although talking things out with a therapist seems productive. Or talking to friends and family.

So the commenter is wrong when he says that medical science will "cure" gays, at least if they're in this category. And there are a lot of reasons for someone to be unhappy if they are gay - there's still a lot of discrimination, and a lot of people in the closet; keeping that sort of secret from those you love has got to be a strain. But it's not "mental illness".

There is another end of the spectrum where brain chemistry and physiology dominates. I've seen this personally, and it scares the hell out of me. I have friends that are gay, and that's not the same thing at all.

Mental Illness: irrational feelings of competence, leading to reckless behavior with no thought of expected consequences; grandiose schemes leading to reckless behavior with no thought of expected consequence; irrational rage at being prevented from engaging in desired reckless behavior, etc.

Homosexuality is something very different than this.

The mentally ill are terribly vulnerable, and easily exploited. They do not have the ability that the rest of us have to protect themselves, to appropriately choose who should be trusted and who should not. Essentially they go about their entire lives in Condition White, only it's amp'ed up to 11.

But it's worse than this. People don't understand mental illness, and are scared by it. Heck, I do understand it, and there have been times I've been scared to death by it. Sometimes society opts for the "Old Yeller" solution:

Special needs student John Odgren was convicted yesterday of first-degree murder for killing a classmate whom he encountered randomly in school one morning, concluding a trial that tested the limits of the insanity defense and a high school’s capacity to measure the dangerousness of a troubled teenager.

After 12 hours of deliberations over three days in Middlesex [Massachusetts] Superior Court, a jury of seven women and five men rejected the defense attorneys’ argument that Odgren was legally insane on Jan. 19, 2007, when he fatally stabbed James F. Alenson, 15, in a bathroom before the start of classes at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School.

Grandiose schemes leading to reckless behavior with no thought of expected consequence.

There's nothing about this that isn't a tragedy: the death of James Alenson, the closing off of the rest of Odgren's life, and the rush to brutal judgment by a jury likely tired of the abuse of the "by reason of insanity" defense by shyster Defense Attorneys. It's not often that I'm grateful that I live in Massachusetts than in Texas; there, he might be on Death Row now.

There are drugs available today that can only be described as "miracle" pills, that correct the brain chemistry and restore balance. Sometimes they're over prescribed, or inappropriately prescribed. Sometimes they just plain don't work on everyone. But as someone who has seen them work - suddenly, almost as if a light switch had been turned on - I'm profoundly grateful to the scientists who have devoted their lives to this challenge.

It gives hope for the possibility of a life as a functional human being.

That is nothing like being gay, and once again I can only say that Marko's commenter can only have been speaking from ignorance. His life - fortunately for him - has not been touched by the scourge of mental illness in his family.

That said, his position is even worse. Suppose for a moment that a drug could be created that would alter the mind enough to "cure" homosexuals. That's a big, big change to a powerful motivation center; I'm skeptical that the drug couldn't be used to change other motivation centers. But I'm not at all skeptical about whether the world is filled with statist pricks who would be delighted to use this en masse to further their political and philosophical ends.

No thanks. We got a view of that in the Gulag, and it's not pretty. There is a regrettable tendency in the scientific community to follow a path where powerful forces want to go.

There is ample evidence to support that if you have the guts to look for it and see it for what it is.

If anyone wants to talk about the science, go ahead. But don't bring anything that smells of non- falsifiable argument from authority; I have a nose for that sort of thing. Sadly, science has a regrettable tendency of giving vacuous support to comfortable notions. If you bring this, bring your A-Game.