Are racists and other haters mentally disordered?

[HereSince1628]

8. Confounding correlations are frequent between symptoms and diagnoses

Anxiety and paranoia may both motivate defensiveness that looks like aggression without consideration of context

I really haven't read much about dementia, but I wouldn't be surprised if loss of ability to understand whats going on in a person's proximate environment produces rising anxiety, distrust and is consequently manifest in defensiveness. That combined with increased impulsiveness that often attends fear could lead to inappropriate expressions.

I'm not sure an orientation to others that arises out of such pathology would, with accuracy, be called hatred, but I think the expressed behaviors may indeed look like those of a 'hater' if an observer is prepared to see that. That sort of misperception contributes to violence in prisons, where under-prepared guards deal with behaviors of mental illness in prisoners as 'rule violations'.

Confounding correlations of symptoms among multiple, different, diagnoses is why phrases are included in diagnostic manuals that caution that symptoms invoked as evidence favoring a diagnosis are "not explained by other causes".