If humanists ever adopt the concept of sainthood to honor their most impressive members, I hope that Chris Stedman is their inaugural inductee. For those unfamiliar with Stedman’s work, he is a humanist chaplain and author who consistently tries to foster engagement and understanding between believers and non-believers and does so with remarkable diplomacy and tact. And his recent article on reasons that atheists shouldn’t equate religion with mental illness was no exception. But I think the hypocrisy and arrogance of this tactic merits a little more venom. So here’s a little more venom.
Has anyone lobbing “mental illness” as a pejorative considered the irony of not being a mental health practitioner making this diagnosis? It wouldn’t be especially egregious were it not for the frequent complaints by non-believers and believers alike that “creation scientist” is an oxymoron. Those complaints are, of course, 100% legitimate. People untrained in the sciences have no business making authoritative scientific claims about the age of the universe or the significance of camel bones. But people who don’t know the DSM like the back of their hand ought not be throwing out words like “psychotic” without professional working knowledge of that term. It’s a real and often devastating state of affairs, not just a nasty adjective to throw at people whose beliefs you don’t consider rational.
Let’s also consider for a moment the number of mental health professionals in the world. I don’t know the exact numbers but the people are legion, even if you only count Manhattan. If a case can be made for the religious as mentally ill, don’t you think that community would have made it? Like, even a fringy one? Or are the angry Internet commentariat and atheist comedians just better informed on what constitutes psychosis? With the exception of Sam Harris—who is a neuroscientist and not a psychiatrist—the public figures making this claim don’t have anything close to the credentials to do so.
And if we go to a hypothetical world in which mental health professionals have come to a consensus that religious belief is symptomatic of a devastating illness, we would presumably want to treat said illness. Antipsychotic medications, despite their many unpleasant side effects, are quite remarkable at combating the delusions of the psychotic sufferer. And yet, there has been no indication that taking antipsychotic medications relieves the religious of their “delusions.” Are we to believe that the psychosis of religious belief is so special, so pervasive, and so untreatable that dozens of available medications have had no documented large-scale effect on these beliefs?
For a population so allegedly interested in science, they are being very pseudo-scientific when they make these claims. Mental illness, and particularly psychotic illnesses, are not to be the subject of jokes or pawns in a name-calling fight. And if you must resort to name-calling, at least try to be accurate.
