Jennifer Selvidge
Aug 23, 2017 · 1 min read

“Mental illnesses are health conditions involving changes in thinking, emotion or behavior (or a combination of these.)” This is an unfair and intellectually lazy use of this definition. Why? Because you can make the same argument about knowledge of climate change (perhaps someone starts to feel anxiety about the climate, perhaps they start to recycle, perhaps they simply begin to believe that humans are causing systemic climatic changes). You can also make this same argument of feminism. Perhaps a person, upon becoming more feminist, experiences increased anxiety about rape culture, changes their thinking on gay pride events, or decides to start wearing different clothing or stop shaving.

Just because a set of scientific facts or a socio-political movement changes your thinking, emotions, or behavior by no means it qualifies as a mental illness. To discuss racism as a mental illness serves simply to make it an individual problem rather than a systemic problem and implicitly asks us to excuse this bad behavior because it is a medical condition.

This is an extremely weak and seemingly biased basis for an article.

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