@Butternut wrote:
I only just found out pedophiles are being told they have a mental illness. There in the dsm-5. All this time i had no idea they we're being labelled as a mental illness. Oooooooh this has made my blood boil.
In no way shape or form do they have a mental illness!
Rant over
To get back to your original point about therapists labelling it as a "mental illness", they have a long, sordid history of playing fast and loose with their "expert stances" on peoples' sexuality/sexual preferances/sexual conduct.
Your probably aware that about half a century ago, homosexuality was officially regarded as a mental illness by their "science". That all changed in the 70s, when the bosses of the mental health industry just up and decided that it suddenly wasn't a "mental illness" anymore. (Hint for our new contestants: if "science" changes overnight because someone just decided it ought to, or because a bunch of people took a vote, it is almost certainly not really science).
But what you may not be aware of is that, when they changed the rules about the "illness" of homosexuality, they left a massive loophole in the book so that homophobic therapists could continue to torment and persecute their gay patients legitimately! They left an super-ambiguous umbrella term called something like "otherwise unclassified sexual dysfunction", which a therapist could basically assign to his/her patients regarding anything even remotely sexual about said patient which the therapist didn't like.
My understanding is that the largest victim pool who were abused by this loophole were gay patients who fell prey to homophobic therapists.
This loophole wasn't closed until about 2015, I believe. In the meantime, countless gay patients were tormented and abused by therapists who were exploiting that loophole.
If your really interested in just how bonkers, unscientific, and obscenely corrupt the authoring process of those manuals is, you might want to check out the advocacy of Dr. Paula Caplan, an insider on the creation of those books who decided to blow the whistle on what really goes on there.
This video is a good starting point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgilBaRbulc
It's a bit long, but it's a real eye-opener.