Rape is not Mental Illness! Its a crime

The task force overseeing development of the new DSM-V has rejected “coercive paraphilia” as an official diagnosis — maintaining rape strictly as a criminal issue and not a mental disorder.

The issue has been debated before and there were arguments in favor of including it in the diagnostic manual’s new edition, due out in May 2013. In fact, this is the fourth time in a row that the task force rejected rape as a mental illness, according to an opinion piece in Psychiatric Times by Allen Frances.

“Rapists need to receive longer prison sentences, not psychiatric hospitalizations that are constitutionally quite questionable,” said Frances, professor emeritus at the Duke University School of Medicine.

Civil rights advocates apparently fear people convicted of rape will be forced into psychiatric facilities after serving their prison sentences where they could be held indefinitely.

“While such continued psychiatric incarceration makes sense from a public safety standpoint, misusing psychiatric diagnosis has grave risks that greatly outweigh the gain,” Frances wrote. “Mislabeling rape as mental disorder in SVP cases allows a form of double jeopardy, constitutes a civil rights violation, and is an unconstitutional deprivation of due process.”