Just because you want it to be true doesn’t make it so.
Or, Science says: “No association between hostility and homophobia”
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2015/09/13/is-homophobia-a-mental-illness/
“Is homophobia actually mental illness?” Well that’s a hell of a question. What constitutes a mental illness is an interesting question itself. Most people in the West tend to accept a number of mental conditions that people treat with medication as qualifying as mental illnesses. Depression, anxiety, bi-polar, schizophrenia. But to what extent? If I am anxious about a test or moving or a new job, most people would not consider me mentally ill. But if I told people I got panic attacks seemingly for no reason, they’d be more sympathetic to the diagnosis. But maybe there is a reason I get them, and I just don’t/won’t recognize it…. But what about the personality disorders? Does having one qualify someone as mentally ill? A woman with borderline can lead a completely normal life sans intervention. It may suck for her kids, but she can deal with it. Perhaps the distinction is, well, borderline…. My point is not a lengthy thesis on what constitutes a bona fide mental illness, merely to show that there’s plenty of debate to be had in good faith. So the question the headline of the article poses is not completely out of line, but it would seem to be advocating including something most people don’t already have a list. So I would hope the author came prepared with a good argument.
“For decades people have attempted to link homosexuality and mental illness – but a new study suggests highlights a “remarkable” link between homophobia and psychoticism.”
These two clauses have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Psychoticism is a personality trait similar to aggression or rebelliousness. If homophobia has anything to do with mental illness, there is first the gigantic mountain to climb of arguing that scoring a certain deviation from the mean on a personality trait constitutes having a mental illness. Spoiler alert: he doesn’t do this. Before I advocate a lynching, though, I’ll concede that he was probably duped, and he made this argument more out of laziness and ignorance than maliciousness. Still, propagating ignorance because of one’s laziness is a crime, imo. He, like I’m sure everyone else who doesn’t have a masters in psych, took one look at a headline and confused “psychoticism” for “psychotic-ness” (is a detachment from reality, and can involve hallucinations). And I’ll let him go on that, because that’s a fraud pushed on him by the psych industry. Their heinous villainy should not go unpunished.
“The study, conducted by Italy’s University of L’Aquila and published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, attempted to find psychological factors that correlate with homophobia. ” To the author’s credit, he sensibly imbeds a hyperlink to the study in the sentence, which puts him head and shoulders above a lot of the media. He also reasonably summarizes the study. My irritation with his paper dissolves after the first paragraph/sentence. Let’s leave the fellow be for the moment and look at the study:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jsm.12975/full
“Psychoticism, Immature Defense Mechanisms and a Fearful Attachment Style are Associated with a Higher Homophobic Attitude”. Sounds pretty damning. Here is exactly how you just read that: “homophobes are psychotic, immature, and fearful”. That is what the authors wanted you to read, although they will deny that, even under torture. And they might actually be sincere in that denial. I’m not sure how far gone they are, whether they are even still consciously aware of how insanely manipulative headlines like these are. Let’s go through this whole thing:
“Introduction: Homophobic behavior and a negative attitude toward homosexuals are prevalent among the population.” On the one hand, I can appreciate not having to provide a citation for a common knowledge statement, but I object to this opening statement. Homophobia is what they are purporting to study. It’s a vague term. It’s essentially a buzzword. It first appeared in print in the 1960’s in a porn magazine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophobia#Origins). What is it that they are even studying? I’m not being flippant. This is a serious question. If people can mean a dozen different things when they say “homophobia”, then making claims about people who exhibit homophobia is going to be next to useless, because unlike things could end up conflated. And to then go on and say this is “prevalent” is a bit much for something that we don’t even have an agreed upon meaning.
“Methods: Five hundred fifty-one university students recruited, aged 18–30, were asked to complete several psychometric evaluation.” This sample group is actually pretty significant. This is a study composed of college undergrads in a university in northern Italy. You think that demographic has any differences with, say, old people in America? Again, not at all being flippant, even if they get results, they only have them for this demographic; using them for other demographics could very easily end up with an apples to oranges scenario.
“Main Outcome Measures: In particular, Homophobia Scale (HS) was used to assess homophobia levels, the Symptoms Check List Revised (SCL-90-R) for the identification of psychopathologic symptoms, the Defense Style Questionnaire (DSQ-40) for the evaluation of defense mechanisms and the Relationship Questionnaire (RQ) for attachment styles.” This is their methodology, and the data they stand on when making their claims. Outcomes on these questionnaires is all they can demonstrate. So what are they?
The homophobia scale is what they are using to define homophobia. So if your definition doesn’t line up with the scale? Then we are talking about different things. You can find copies of the scale and how it’s evaluated here: http://www.midss.org/content/homophobia-scale
It’s a self-reported questionnaire with 25 questions, asking you to give a number 1-5 on how much you agree with a statement. It includes questions like “Gay people deserve what they get” (I don’t know what that means either), and “I think homosexual people should not work with children”, and “When I meet someone I try to find out if he/she is gay”, and “Marriage between homosexual individuals is acceptable”. The score is tallied by simple arithmetic and none of the questions are weighted more than another. If you’re not intellectually lazy, you may notice that how someone feels about some of these questions is not necessarily an indication of homophobia. Objecting to a religious institution providing a perceived religious ceremony is not necessarily homophobia. I don’t know how simply being curious as to someone’s sexual orientation is homophobic. The validity of the questionnaire itself is quite dubious. But this is not addressed by the authors.
The SCL-90-R is owned by Pearson, so obviously no free copies are easily accessible. It’s another self-reported questionnaire that probes for nine different types of negative personality traits (somatization, obsession–compulsion, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety, hostility, phobic anxiety, paranoid ideation, and psychoticism).
The DSQ-40 is a self-reported questionnaire that judges psychological “defenses”, which are categorized as mature, neurotic, and immature. “Mature defense mechanisms include sublimation, humor, anticipation, and suppression. Neurotic defenses include undoing, pseudo-altruism, idealization, and reaction formation. Immature defense mechanisms include projection, acting out, isolation, devaluation, autistic fantasy, denial, passive aggressiveness, displacement, disassociation, splitting, rationalization, and somatization.” You can take a smaller version yourself here:
http://www.web.pdx.edu/~dcoleman/dsq.html
Like the homophobia scale, this quiz is up for debate too:
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/7506095_A_Study_of_the_Face_Validity_of_the_40_Item_Version_of_the_Defense_Style_Questionnaire_%28DSQ-40%29
The RQ is another quiz that measures “attachment styles”, out of four possibilities: secure, preoccupied, fearful, and dismissing. It asks you to pick “which of these 4 best describes you”, and makes very broad statements about how you feel about committed relationships. Also, most of it is based on people in committed relationships. Nearly half of the participants in the study were single, making most of the diagnostics for this test seemingly dubious. And again, consider the age. These are college kids. What kind of close personal relationships were you in in college? Have those/you changed since then? Will that affect the results? Read more/take the test here: http://members.psyc.sfu.ca/labs/kim_bartholomew/attachment/self
The results: They provided the results of the survey, and I’m annoyed to no end that they did not even bother to compare the “homophobia” score to all of the lovely demography info they had. They had 7 homosexuals in their survey (that is, 1.2% of the survey population), and I’d be very keen on knowing their homophobia scores, for example. Also, I like how the choices for religion were just Catholic and agnostic. Anyway, the average “homophobia score” was 25, with a standard deviation of 20 (that is, most people scored between 5 and 45). The score is out of 100, with 100 being the most homophobic. So most people were not actually homophobic to begin with. Of significance is the role that sex plays in the score: women scored an average of 22, and men scored an average of 35. That is, men are more homophobic…. Or men are more honest about their homophobia when filling out self-reported forms. Again, not flippant. This is a sensible consideration the authors never take into account.
After this, there’s a wall of statistics jargon, so unless you’ve suffered through a good college-level stats class before, your eyes are going to glaze over here. They know that too, consciously or otherwise. Out of the whole table of things they looked at, they found an association between homophobia and psychoticism, fearful attachment, immature and neurotic defense mechanisms, and depression. And by association, that means as the scores on the homophobia scale changes, the scales on these other, unrelated tests also changes. They did NOT isolate the people who qualified as “homophobic” and then look for associations, they just looked at how scores change relative to the average. Please re-read that if you didn’t get it the first time, that is a huge, huge deal. In the case of psychoticism, fearful attachment, and immature defense, large scores on those end tended to share larger homophobia scale scores. And by larger, I mean more deviation from the mean (that is, how different your scores are from the average). Larger scores on neurotic defense mechanisms and depression also coincided with smaller homophobia scores. Curious how that didn’t make it into the title. Equally as curious, and again, I am not being flippant, is how all the other things they measured against that turned up nothing didn’t make it in the headline either. Somatization, obsession–compulsion, interpersonal sensitivity, anxiety, hostility, phobic anxiety, paranoid ideation, mature defense mechanisms, and preoccupied, fearful, and dismissing attachment styles all showed no association. I could say legitimately, using this study, “No association between hostility and homophobia”. You think that would fly? Or I could say “Neurotic defense mechanisms and depression negatively associated with homophobia”, which the right-wing press could, using these exact same standards, turn into “Neurotic, depressed people show biggest support for homosexuality”.
“Discussion: Discrimination toward homosexuals must be condemned”. And here we see the paper in its entirety. This is why the study was done, to justify writing that line. Everything else in this paper was a farce to prop up this assertion, and it is absolutely abhorrent. And that has nothing to do with the gays. It’s an abuse of science. It’s fraud. It’s throwing numbers at people, pretending to have information that isn’t real so someone can say “science says my political view is right.” This is not how science works. “We tested a bunch of negative personality traits against a near-worthless survey on ‘homophobia’, a term we haven’t bothered to define, and found a hit”. That is what was done, and that is not what is being sold. The general public doesn’t know the nine categories tested in the SCL-90-R, the public doesn’t know about attachment styles, the public doesn’t know about the DSQ-40, and if the ever laid eyes on the homophobia survey, they’d tear it to shreds. And the publishers and the entire psych industry is complicit in pushing out this fraud anyway, because it gives them political power. They get to tell people what’s right and wrong. God is dead, and the psychologists are taking the place of the church. Repent! All the public reads is that in this article is “conservatives are bad people”, and that is so far from what was demonstrated. Psychology can be and is used as a weapon, believe you me.
This study existed to get published and turned into headlines like the one published on Pink News. A reader there, even with a probably good head on his shoulder was duped into thinking that science proved that homophobes are “crazy”. Except science didn’t remotely do that. But that’s what the dialogue is going to be, because the media has no respect for reading sources. Sources don’t exist to spread information, they are ammunition in a war of persuasion and manipulation. “Here’s a bunch of jargon and numbers you don’t understand. It means we’re right.” This kind of mindset is incredibly destructive to our society. Instead of thinking of people with different viewpoints as having differing opinions, or not being fully informed, we think of them as bad people. Or worse. The Pink News article and others like it are insinuating that people who disagree with him on this issue are literally mentally ill. That’s insane. We have got to treat people with differing points of view with more respect. We cannot find it conscionable to fling “science” at each other as if it were feces. We must demand people start holding media accountable by checking sources. And we need to reign in our psychologists.