---
title: "Denialism"
chunk: 3/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denialism"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:24:13.946180+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Mental illness denial or mental disorder denial is where a person denies the existence of mental disorders. Serious analysts, as well as pseudoscientific movements, question the existence of certain disorders. A minority of professional researchers see disorders such as depression from a sociocultural perspective and argue that the solution to it is fixing a dysfunction in society, not in the person's brain. Some people may also deny that they have a mental illness after being diagnosed, and certain analysts argue this denialism is usually fueled by narcissistic injury. Anti-psychiatry movements such as Scientology promote mental illness denial by having alternative practices to psychiatry.

=== Election denial ===

Election denial is baseless rejection of the outcome of a fair election. Since the 2020 United States presidential election, there has been an ongoing narrative asserting that it was fraudulent. Similar events have occurred in different countries: Brazil in 2022 when former president Jair Bolsonaro after his defeat in the 2022 Brazilian general election, questioning the accuracy of the country's electronic voting system. In the 2021 Peruvian general election, presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori alleged fraud and irregularities in the voting count which were disproved by election authorities and international observers.

== Historiography ==

Historical negationism, the denialism of widely accepted historical facts, is a major source of concern among historians and it is frequently used to falsify or distort accepted historical events. In attempting to revise the past, negationists are distinguished by the use of techniques inadmissible in proper historical discourse, such as presenting known forged documents as genuine, inventing ingenious but implausible reasons for distrusting genuine documents, attributing conclusions to books and sources that report the opposite, manipulating statistical series to support the given point of view, and deliberately mistranslating texts.
Some countries, such as Germany, have criminalized the negationist revision of certain historical events, while other countries take a more cautious position for various reasons, such as the protection of free speech. Others mandate negationist views, such as California, where schoolchildren have been explicitly prevented from learning about the California genocide.

=== Armenian genocide denialism ===

=== Holocaust denialism ===

Holocaust denial refers to the denial of the murder of 5 to 6 million Jews by the Nazis in Europe during World War 2. In this context, the term is a subset of genocide denial, which is a form of politically motivated denialism.

=== Nakba denialism ===

Nakba denial refers to attempts to downgrade, deny and misdescribe the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians during the Nakba, in which four-fifths of all Palestinians were driven off their lands and into exile.

=== Srebrenica massacre denialism ===

Sonja Biserko, president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, and Edina Bečirević, the Faculty of Criminalistics, Criminology and Security Studies of the University of Sarajevo have pointed to a culture of denial of the Srebrenica massacre in Serbian society, taking many forms and present in particular in political discourse, the media, the law and the educational system.

== See also ==

== Notes ==

== References ==

=== Works cited ===

== Further reading ==

=== Articles ===
Holtcamp, W. (2012). "Flavors of uncertainty: The difference between denial and debate". Environmental Health Perspectives. 120 (8): a314–a319. doi:10.1289/ehp.120-a314 (inactive January 6, 2026). PMC 3440096. PMID 22854265.{{cite journal}}:  CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of January 2026 (link)
Kahn-Harris, Keith (August 3, 2018). "Denialism: what drives people to reject the truth". The Guardian.
Oreskes, Naomi, "History Matters to Science: It helps to explain how cynical actors undermine the truth", Scientific American, vol. 323, no. 6 (December 2020), p. 81. "In our 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt, Erik M. Conway and I showed how the same arguments [as those used to cast doubt on the link between tobacco use and lung cancer] were used to delay action on acid rain, the ozone hole and climate change – and this year [2020] we saw the spurious "freedom" argument being used to disparage mask wearing [during the COVID-19 pandemic]."
Rees, M. (2013). "Denial of catastrophic risks". Science. 339 (6124): 1123. Bibcode:2013Sci...339.1123R. doi:10.1126/science.1236756. PMID 23471373.
Rosenau, J. (2012). "Science denial: A guide for scientists". Trends in Microbiology. 20 (12): 567–569. doi:10.1016/j.tim.2012.10.002. PMID 23164600.
Sharot, T.; Korn, C.W.; Dolan, R.J. (2011). "How unrealistic optimism is maintained in the face of reality". Nature Neuroscience. 14 (11): 1475–1479. doi:10.1038/nn.2949. PMC 3204264. PMID 21983684.

=== Books ===
Gorman, Sara E.; Gorman, Jack M. (2016). Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-939660-3.
McIntyre, Lee (2019). The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud and Pseudoscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 149–166. ISBN 978-0-262-53893-0.
Norgaard, Kari Marie (2011). Living In Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-51585-6.
Specter, Michael (2009). Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives. Penguin. ISBN 978-1-59420-230-8.

== External links ==

Denialism Blog
"Refusing Flu Shots? Maybe You're A 'Denialist'" National Public Radio