Toward a psychiatric gulag.

Thirty-two years ago, amid threats and intimidation from militant homosexual pressure groups, the American Psychiatric Association delisted homosexuality as a "diagnosable behavioral disorder." At about the same time, the spurious term "homophobia" began to circulate within the ranks of the left, eventually migrating into mainstream public discourse. That expression, we are told, refers to an irrational fear of, or hatred for, homosexuals. The purpose of coining that term was to lay the predicate for pathologizing, and eventually criminalizing, a negative view of homosexuality, as well as other politically incorrect attitudes.

The December 11 Seattle Times offered a valuable update on that process, which has been underway for more than a generation. "Mental-health practitioners say they regularly confront extreme forms of racism, homophobia and other prejudice in the course of therapy, and some patients are disabled by these beliefs," reports the paper. "As doctors increasingly weigh the effects of race and culture on mental illness, some are asking whether pathological bias ought to be an official psychiatric diagnosis. Advocates have circulated draft guidelines and have begun to conduct systematic studies. While the proposal is gaining traction, it is still in the early stages of being considered by the professionals who decide on new diagnoses."

Those "guidelines," which are being developed by a California psychiatrist named Edward Dunbar, would expand the ability of the state and its agents to exercise arbitrary power over practically anyone deemed to be incapacitated owing to "extreme" prejudice--which could be practically anyone.

"Perpetrators of hate crimes could become candidates for treatment," the Times explains, "and physicians would become arbiters of how to distinguish 'ordinary prejudice' from pathological bias." If the Bush administration's proposal to impose universal mental healthcare screening comes to fruition, it's likely that everybody, not just those accused of "hate crimes," would be subject to scrutiny for "pathological bias"--not just in the form of racism or "homophobia," but perhaps "paranoia" and "anti-government" attitudes as well.

According to Dunbar and supporters of his proposed guidelines, "patients with disabling levels of prejudice should be treated for the same reason as are patients with any other disorder: They would feel, live and function better." Ah, yes, better living through totalitarian therapeutic intervention, perhaps coupled with the judicious use of psychotropic drugs. This was the conceit that inspired the psihuska, or psychiatric gulag, where "delusional" people who rebelled against the benevolent Soviet state were forcibly "cured" of their "anti-social" attitudes.