Minority report

MUKUL SHARMA

Neurologist Kathleen Taylor, a research scientist at Oxford University, says that religious fundamentalism may one day be treated in the same way as mental illness. She thinks that strong negative beliefs could be eradicated using techniques already in development for behaviour modification.

“Someone who has, for example, become radicalised to a cult ideology — we might stop seeing that as a personal choice that they have chosen as a result of pure free will and may start treating it as some kind of mental disturbance,” she says. This could be a very positive thing because there are a lot of lurking beliefs in our society that end up doing agreat amount of damage in the long run.

On the other hand, a 22-year-old study at a German University in Hamburg has many psychologists wondering if atheism is also a sign — or a warning — of a more serious mental illness already present or in the process of developing. According to Dr Hans Zimmermann, overt atheism as a way of life by some individuals was found to be a common component inherent in many people suffering from other forms of mental illness.

Ironically, both studies may be insidiously incorrect. That is because if we stop thinking of “abnormal” as mentally deviant and consider it simply as something that doesn’t confirm to a statistical norm, then both fundamentalism and atheism comprise a minuscule percentage of any population.

But whether that by itself requires psychiatric intervention is a far deeper question. Because, then, we’d also have to think of “treating” other minorities —for instance, geniuses.