open challenge: can anyone debunk this homophobic rhetoric?

Xurtio · 06-01-2015, 01:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by John Wilkes Booth

right well i mentioned in my initial post that i saw some flaws in his logic, the one that really comes to mind is that if there was some correlation between homosexuality and mental illness, i.e. even if homosexuals are x% more likely to be mentally ill than heteros, it doesn't mean that homosexuality is a result of mental illness or vice versa. it could just be a correlation. i've only taken the intro required classes on psychology but i remember from that the textbook stressing that you can't draw causation from a correlation alone.

but my question/thought experiment for you is, say such a correlation exists. just hypothetically speaking, say that homosexuality is caused by that hormonal flush or whatever in the womb, and that same hormonal flush can also cause the child to be bi polar or some other mental illness. and as a result the statistics say homosexuals are more likely than straight people to develop these disorders. how would you ever differentiate between that and the disorders being caused by suppression and homophobia?

The most obvious way is to have a better understanding of the physiological mechanisms so you could measure it in the brain and compare brains of lots of people .

Psychologists already have a stress-diathesis model (two different people exposed to the same environmental stimulus - one might trigger a mental illness due to biological differences) which is part of the more general "biopsychosocial" model - that is, acknowledgement that influence in mental illness outcome depends on a combination of social, biological, and psychological factors.

These factors are separated by monozygotic twin studies, and those might inform you somewhat to the degree which illnesses (or homosexuality) may be social vs. biological in general, but to further correlate them would require some careful case by case statistics and intervention studies (but it would obviously be unethical to try to induce mental illness in people) to establish causation. You could start a homosexual support group and see if correlation between homosexuality and mental illness goes down in 20 years, but then you'd also be ignoring any biological changes and assuming them fixed.