Finding a cure for hate | Toronto Star

Interesting and lengthy article on trying to understand the psychological and medical reasons behind hate, an initiative by Dr. Izzedin Abuelaish, of U of T’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, who became famous after most of his family was killed by an Israeli rocket in Gaza, and became the basis for his book, I Shall Not Hate.

For his part, Abuelaish likes to think of hatred as a disease or mental disorder. It certainly works, metaphorically — hatred spreads from person to person, like an infection, he says. It can metastasize, like cancer; it can be chronic, like diabetes. People are not born with hatred, he believes; they acquire it from the environment, just as people are exposed to bacteria or second-hand smoke.

Others at the workshop were hesitant to brand hatred as a disease or disorder. Much controversy has come from the “great tendency of psychiatry to turn issues that are popularly in the human condition into mental disorders,” noted Dr. Alexander Simpson, chief of forensic psychiatry with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto.

“To hear a universal human experience — an expression of negative emotion like hate — being someway turned into a disease is the sort of thing that psychiatry’s been told off for doing for the last 30 years,” Simpson said. “I have some reluctance to consider that.”

He raised the possibility that perhaps hatred can be likened to blood pressure; we all have it but when it reaches a certain level, we get sick.

Finding a cure for hate | Toronto Star.