LGBTQIA and Mental Health
Item
- Title
- LGBTQIA and Mental Health
- Creator
- Navadeep
- Date
- 2015
- extracted text
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LGBTQIA & Mental Health
Navadeep
As I sit in Hyderabad, Telangana and start working on this piece of paper about LGBT and
mental health from a lay gay person's perspective with no scientific knowledge of mental
health there in western India, Goa's Sports and Youth affairs minister Mr. Ramesh Tawadkar
makes an announcement on setting up centers LGBT youth to cure them.
Mr. Towadkor said, "We will make them (LGBT youth) normal. We will have a centre for
them. Like Alcoholic Anonymous centres, we will have centres. We will train them and give
them medicines too,".
I initially thought that I would try to present here a picture of mental trauma that LGBT
people go through in their lifetime and how it is mostly left unnoticed and unaddressed. But
this new unpleasant incident reminded me that we still live in the times where the whole
debate of looking down upon the sexuality of LGBT people as a mental disorder is very much
unsettled. Saying so I would now like to project on two major aspects in this paper, one
being "Homosexuality and gender identity as a mental health issue" and the other on
"Mental health issues of LGBT people."
Ideas and observations presented in this paper are not based on any specific research, they
are purely based on my individual reading/experiences as an open-and-out-queer person
and also from the learnings I had from my other queer friends.
The idea of homosexuality as a deviant nature emerged out of religious moralistic
understanding which eventually paved its way into the field of medical sciences, got
categorised as a disease (one that could be and must be treated and cured), without any
proper scientific evidence. This shows the extent to which moral and ethical beliefs of
religion had penetrated into the field of science. With the passage of time, there was a shift
in the arguments of pathologising of homosexuality. For a good long time it was believed
that children with single parents and children with troubled and abusive childhood tend to
have these perverse homosexual tendencies. The works of people like Alfred Kinsey and
Evelyn Hooker during 1940's to 1960's challenged the notion of considering homosexuality
as a disorder. In 1973, American Psychiatric Association had called for voting among the
board of directors to remove homosexuality from the list of Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which was passed by members vote in 1974. Though this
was a welcoming move it did not completely end the debate of treating homosexuality.
Further it resulted in creation of two categories of homosexuality, ego-syntonic
homosexuality and ego-dystonic homosexuality. Though the diagnosis has been completely
removed from the DSM, this classification has been adopted by Indian Psychiatric
Association and Medical Council of India.
Ego-dystonic sexual orientation is a mental disorder where the individual has a great
discomfort with his/her sexual orientation and feels/expresses a strong desire to change. In
contrast to this Ego-syntonic homosexuality is a state where the give individual is absolutely
comfortable with his/her sexual orientation.
This classification is a big laugh at the lives of homosexual people, with the kind of stigma,
hatred and taboo a queer person is put to live with, would he/she be in a situation of making
an independent choice of living life as a happy queer person without a conflict of thought.
With scarce support and inadequate information, most queer people would be in a state of
confusion and dilemma in the initial days after realising the difference of their sexuality from
that of the so called normal heterosexual crowd, would this be considered as ego-dystonic
homosexuality? adding to this, the child rights in this country are still evolving and being
discussed at different levels. When a child comes out to his/her parents as gay or lesbian or
if parents happen to find out about their child's homosexuality, who would be the decision
maker of considering this child homosexuality as ego-dystonic or ego-syntonic ?
All these questions would project how this classification has only tried to maintain the
existing anti-gay and homophobic status.
"That I have been open and out as a queer person living in Hyderabad. Since my early
childhood, I always knew that I was sexually attracted to men unlike others around me. I
was never attracted to the opposite sex. I am the only child of my parents. I told my parents
about my sexuality when I was 20 and they could never understand it. They thought that I
had made a choice to be homosexual. In the past my parents put me through a battery of
very traumatic and unscientific therapies (called conversion or reparative therapies) to try to
change my sexual orientation.
That at the age of twenty and soon after my graduation exams, I was admitted to a
psychiatric home for 8 months and was put through anti-psychotic drugs and
Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT). As these treatments didn't seem to work to my father's
satisfaction, he forcibly took me off them very abruptly without allowing time for a reduction
of dosage. I suffered two months of severe withdrawal symptoms ranging from intense fear,
anxiety, fear of death and trauma."
The above account is that of a trans-woman in Hyderabad who has lived through this
psychiatric abuse and violence during her adolescence in late 1990's! This particular
individual's story is just one among many such LGBTQ people who survived the inhuman
reparative and electro convulsive therapies. Although the LGBT rights movement in India has
come a long way, unfortunately the medical fraternity, especially the psychiatric stream, has
more or less remained in the same state of offering treatment and cure to homosexuality.
Most of the people I meet in the community have been taken to psychiatrists after coming
out to their parents about their homosexuality. The fact that should be surprising is not that
the parents take their gay children to the psychiatrist, but the assurance that these medical
professionals offer about straightening their sexuality. The frequency at which I happen to
meet people in the LGBT community who express their distress of being taken to a doctor
and be prescribed to have anti-psychotic drugs deeply worries me. Some people go to their
psychiatrists to keep their parents content and to avoid taking the prescribed drugs;
whereas most of the others are forced to the clinic and are carefully monitored to ensure
that they take the drugs, which in turn have various adverse effects.
Despite the clear stand of World Health Organization, APA and many other international
bodies that homosexuality is a normal and healthy variant of human sexuality; sadly, the
state of affairs in this regard has remained regressive in our country. It's time for the mental
health fraternity and set-ups such as Medical Council of India to take a progressive stand and
ensure a healthy and safe living to the LGBT people in the country.
Till now I have described the still existing notion of homosexuality as a mental disorder, now
let's see where the mental health of LGBT people stands amidst of a situation like this. From
the studies of Evelyn Hooker in 1950's till the various present-day studies, many have
asserted that there is no psychological difference between heterosexual and homosexual
individuals; like any other people homosexual people also go through stages of distress,
depressions, anxiety disorder and also suicidal tendencies. Most of these are regarded as
symptoms of homosexuality itself and it is often completely ignored that these are because
of the stigma, exclusion and rejection for being a homosexual.
The roots of mental distress and depression among LGBT people can be found from their
childhood itself. A majority of the LGBT individuals report, being bullied and harassed as
kids in school. Most of this bullying goes very much unnoticed both by teachers and parents,
under the opinion that it's okay as this might help the particular child who is being bullied to
change and behave more like a boy and more like a girl. The constant effort by peers,
parents and teachers in correcting and making children fit in the apt roles of being a boy and
girl unavoidably has its implications on the LGBT people and further results in internal
homophobia. This continues further as they grown into adults, they are taught about the
gender appropriate skills/manner, walk, talk, mannerism, compelling the person to fit into
the socially sanctioned, heterosexual behavior. Also the effort that a homosexual people
need to put in to fit into the so called normality and being continuously conscious among
their peers and family to hide their true sexual identity, makes life no easier.
A large part of this is very much unaddressed, resulting in a great level of depression and
anxiety disorder among LGBT people. Depression of an LGBT individual is very much
correlated with the social acceptance and personal acceptance that the individual have
about his/her sexuality and gender identity. By now there are lot of researches and studies
which state that suicidal tendencies among LGBT youth are relatively higher than those
among heterosexual youth.
The responsibility of assuring an LGBT person with safe and healthy environment lies not
only with family and peers but also with the mental health fraternity. As medical
professionals they play a huge role in providing society with rightful scientific information
about sexuality and gender related issues, in order to make it an inclusive one. Being
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Asexual and Queer is not a mental health problem and
neither for being so does one deserve to be subjected to a life which in turn affects the
mental health adversely.
The basic issue ... is not whether some or many homosexuals can be found to be neurotically
disturbed. In a society like ours where homosexuals are uniformly treated with
disparagement or contempt—to say nothing about outright hostility—it would be surprising
indeed if substantial numbers of them did not suffer from an impaired self-image and some
degree of unhappiness with their stigmatized status. ... It is manifestly unwarranted and
inaccurate, however, to attribute such neuroticism, when it exists, to intrinsic aspects of
homosexuality itself.
—- Marmor J. Epilogue, 1980.
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