I agree that the diagnoses of gender identity disorder and gender dysphoria are psychiatric in origin. "Gender incongruence" appears to have been coined by trans activists and was included in the International Classification of Diseases by WHO. They have listed it among the diagnoses of actual illnesses, but have also said they don't bel…
I agree that the diagnoses of gender identity disorder and gender dysphoria are psychiatric in origin. "Gender incongruence" appears to have been coined by trans activists and was included in the International Classification of Diseases by WHO. They have listed it among the diagnoses of actual illnesses, but have also said they don't believe that people who are "gender incongruent" are in any way abnormal.
My point is that the psychiatric profession no longer has control over the trajectory of the medicalization of people who say they are "transgendered, nonbinary, gender incongruent," etc. The gender clinic whistleblowers who are mental health professionals have said that they were not listened to when they raised questions about patients' mental health issues and treatment, or more commonly lack thereof. Trans activists have focused a lot of energy on changing medical transitions into a series of aggressive cosmetic processes and procedures, and are succeeding in their efforts to end requirements of undergoing psych evals and psychotherapy prior to hormones and surgeries.
The one major change in which accelerated this phenomenon in the US in 2010 was not the iPhone or social media but but was the Affordable Care Act,
Section 1557 which made paying for the diagnosis and treatment of gender-related pseudoscience a condition of being able to offer insurance in the US.
No queer studies group lobbied for that. And I’d psychiatry didn’t support it, it wouldnt be a medical condition.
The delusional shouldn’t define their condition, and the requirement for the world to pretend to recognize the delusion is real. Psychiatrists mandate this.
Astonishing. And, they get paid by insurers to do so!
Yes, you are right about the role of insurance coverage. I didn't know about the role of the ACA coverage---thanks for posting that history! Trans activists made insurance coverage a central goal of their lobbying efforts immediately after the "sexual reassignment surgeries" started achieving good cosmetic outcomes for male patients.
The American Psychiatric Association has been very influenced by radical cultural trends when it revises the DSM, and now the WHO is even more radical. The ongoing revisions in the gender identity diagnoses, now non-diagnoses, are blatantly not based in science.
The classic disaster is R.D. Laings efforts to eliminate psychosis and schizophrenia as illnesses in the 60’s and 70’s dovetailed with the elimination in early 80’s of SRO (single room occupancy) housing for the disturbed via Regan tax break eliminations thus routing hundred of thousands of disturbed people into homelessness over the last 40 years. In his case it was “existential philosophy” and disbelief that the two conditions could be organic (hint: neurotransmitters). Coincidentally he also worked at Tavistock the apparent epicenter of quack psychiatry in the UK.
Currently we can see this in two forms - trans, and autism. Trans is fighting to completely remove the delusion as an issue; autism is fighting to have legitimate autism protected as a condition. Self-diagnosis of autism trivializes a condition which when severe becomes lifelong institutionalization. I recently had a good friend who was autistic commit suicide, I have been attempting to understand him for years.
That delusional people can influence the gatekeepers is evidence that the system is corrupted. As always there a Star Trek episode for that “Whom Gods Destroy”
Laing was a psychoanalyst and advocate of conversation over biomedicalisation. His link with the Tavistock is spurious for recent debates. GIDS, now closed there, was completely out of sync with the rest of the clinic and it was whistleblowers from the older psychoanalytical tradition there that first triggered the story coming out of a clinical scandal. See Hannah Barnes' book 'Time to Think'. Her and Hilary Cass have between them exposed the full story, if those in the US want to track it in detail. Both have been vilified and threatened here in the UK by trans activists but the latter are losing the battle. The Cass recommendations are being implemented and puberty blockers have been banned. by the incoming Labour government. Sadly in the US the Democrats are trans captured so it may take Trump to do the business for your sadly divided country.
I wish that the medical and psychological associations in the U.S. would embrace the Cass Review as the excellent scientific piece of work that it is. Alas, the leadership of our scientific associations here have been absorbed into the anti-realist identitarian movement and may not ever emerge from it.
Interesting that you bring up R. D. Laing, I was interested in his thinking when I was a grad student. I don't recall who the people were who influenced him, but I can easily see now the similarity of his perspective to that of Michel Foucault. And of course Thomas Szasz. The campaign to tear down psych hospitals and turn mentally ill people onto the street was one of the most destructive movements in the 20th century.
I am very sorry to hear about your friend. The loss of a friend through death is deeply painful, and usually even more difficult if the friend died by his own hand.
It is always a pleasure to talk you. I will look forward to future opportunities.
We are of similar age, I read RD Laing as a undergrad at Caltech.
I also had sex with sex researchers from Johns Hopkins and Harvard [that’s my tiresome episodic memory, I can tell you where (behind a bookstore on Santa Monica boulevard called Circus of Books) and how and what happened and how I felt) and later got an interesting lectures in bed on the hideous Dr. Money from a colleague of Money (did you know there are three sexualities? Lust, limerant and attachment, and then intellectual, social, emotional, platonic varieties… of those… then trans and cis and homosexual and heterosexual… variants? These people exist to create endless permutations in an exercise of complicating obvious ideas to see what sticks, then build data to support. Color me unconvinced).
And then there was when I was fucking (pardon vulgarity) the head of UCLA psychiatry in his Bel Air house. He was very sexy professor daddy handsome, you know the type, conservative, just barely out of reach, but tempting and horny, big dick and hairy chest… you know, pure gay version of Danielle Steel carnip. Tweed jackets, honestly. No pipe.
Then he made a fatal error (those characters always do, right?) He gave me an APBN (American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology) exam for fun - board certification that one could practice psychiatry I suppose in California. We’re talking 1983, we were cozy in his home office, we had been to Santa Monica for lunch in his ivory colored Mercedes ( he was inordinately cathected to) I sat at a sort of artificial Louis 15th desk, one Saturday afternoon and took it.
I enjoy taking tests. Especially peculiar verbal ones, “Woman admitted, presenting dissociative identity disorder and incomplete cathexis of death of small pekinese…” (Oh she was of two minds about her dog, it was annoying but she loved it).
1600 SAT, 36 ACT, Merit Scholar. Watson Fellow, it’s fun to test.
I scored sufficiently to be a certified psychiatrist with one exception, I missed a couple of questions on drug names, I only knew brand names (of course I should have known Thorazine was Chlorpromazine - I do now.)
Naturally he was horrified for many reasons, and I through it was inappropriate to do psychiatric assessments at our stage of fucking. I wasn’t even 20.
He probably should have waited past the 10th fuck for psych exams, and be prepared for someone who finds them trivial. I mean he was head of UCLA psych school.
He couldn’t believe someone could simple reward books from childhood and correlate and synthesize sufficient wisdom for the practicum section( as opposed to recall) I have that effect on men.
That’s why I’m negative on psychiatry and offshoots. What’s certified is childishly simple and obvious, I tend to attract psychiatrists and psychologists and learn dark things, and I find them all simply writer-manque.
The current APBN I’m sure has current nonsense on gender. and little on poor adjustment to puberty.
I agree-biomedicalization has been an inter-disciplinary enterprise. In the UK and Holland it has been driven actually by clinical psychology (my profession) and the catastrophe of the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock Clinic in London was led by psychologists not psychiatrists. The discussion here though is broadly in agreement that functional psychiatric diagnoses are all logically flawed and that psychiatry has had it fair share of 'great and desperate cures' (from John Bunyan on medical arrogance) from ECT and psychosurgery to anti-depressants and major tranquillizers.
I agree that the diagnoses of gender identity disorder and gender dysphoria are psychiatric in origin. "Gender incongruence" appears to have been coined by trans activists and was included in the International Classification of Diseases by WHO. They have listed it among the diagnoses of actual illnesses, but have also said they don't believe that people who are "gender incongruent" are in any way abnormal.
My point is that the psychiatric profession no longer has control over the trajectory of the medicalization of people who say they are "transgendered, nonbinary, gender incongruent," etc. The gender clinic whistleblowers who are mental health professionals have said that they were not listened to when they raised questions about patients' mental health issues and treatment, or more commonly lack thereof. Trans activists have focused a lot of energy on changing medical transitions into a series of aggressive cosmetic processes and procedures, and are succeeding in their efforts to end requirements of undergoing psych evals and psychotherapy prior to hormones and surgeries.
The one major change in which accelerated this phenomenon in the US in 2010 was not the iPhone or social media but but was the Affordable Care Act,
Section 1557 which made paying for the diagnosis and treatment of gender-related pseudoscience a condition of being able to offer insurance in the US.
No queer studies group lobbied for that. And I’d psychiatry didn’t support it, it wouldnt be a medical condition.
The delusional shouldn’t define their condition, and the requirement for the world to pretend to recognize the delusion is real. Psychiatrists mandate this.
Astonishing. And, they get paid by insurers to do so!
Yes, you are right about the role of insurance coverage. I didn't know about the role of the ACA coverage---thanks for posting that history! Trans activists made insurance coverage a central goal of their lobbying efforts immediately after the "sexual reassignment surgeries" started achieving good cosmetic outcomes for male patients.
The American Psychiatric Association has been very influenced by radical cultural trends when it revises the DSM, and now the WHO is even more radical. The ongoing revisions in the gender identity diagnoses, now non-diagnoses, are blatantly not based in science.
You’re spot on.
The classic disaster is R.D. Laings efforts to eliminate psychosis and schizophrenia as illnesses in the 60’s and 70’s dovetailed with the elimination in early 80’s of SRO (single room occupancy) housing for the disturbed via Regan tax break eliminations thus routing hundred of thousands of disturbed people into homelessness over the last 40 years. In his case it was “existential philosophy” and disbelief that the two conditions could be organic (hint: neurotransmitters). Coincidentally he also worked at Tavistock the apparent epicenter of quack psychiatry in the UK.
Currently we can see this in two forms - trans, and autism. Trans is fighting to completely remove the delusion as an issue; autism is fighting to have legitimate autism protected as a condition. Self-diagnosis of autism trivializes a condition which when severe becomes lifelong institutionalization. I recently had a good friend who was autistic commit suicide, I have been attempting to understand him for years.
That delusional people can influence the gatekeepers is evidence that the system is corrupted. As always there a Star Trek episode for that “Whom Gods Destroy”
Good conversation thank you.
Laing was a psychoanalyst and advocate of conversation over biomedicalisation. His link with the Tavistock is spurious for recent debates. GIDS, now closed there, was completely out of sync with the rest of the clinic and it was whistleblowers from the older psychoanalytical tradition there that first triggered the story coming out of a clinical scandal. See Hannah Barnes' book 'Time to Think'. Her and Hilary Cass have between them exposed the full story, if those in the US want to track it in detail. Both have been vilified and threatened here in the UK by trans activists but the latter are losing the battle. The Cass recommendations are being implemented and puberty blockers have been banned. by the incoming Labour government. Sadly in the US the Democrats are trans captured so it may take Trump to do the business for your sadly divided country.
I wish that the medical and psychological associations in the U.S. would embrace the Cass Review as the excellent scientific piece of work that it is. Alas, the leadership of our scientific associations here have been absorbed into the anti-realist identitarian movement and may not ever emerge from it.
Interesting that you bring up R. D. Laing, I was interested in his thinking when I was a grad student. I don't recall who the people were who influenced him, but I can easily see now the similarity of his perspective to that of Michel Foucault. And of course Thomas Szasz. The campaign to tear down psych hospitals and turn mentally ill people onto the street was one of the most destructive movements in the 20th century.
I am very sorry to hear about your friend. The loss of a friend through death is deeply painful, and usually even more difficult if the friend died by his own hand.
It is always a pleasure to talk you. I will look forward to future opportunities.
We are of similar age, I read RD Laing as a undergrad at Caltech.
I also had sex with sex researchers from Johns Hopkins and Harvard [that’s my tiresome episodic memory, I can tell you where (behind a bookstore on Santa Monica boulevard called Circus of Books) and how and what happened and how I felt) and later got an interesting lectures in bed on the hideous Dr. Money from a colleague of Money (did you know there are three sexualities? Lust, limerant and attachment, and then intellectual, social, emotional, platonic varieties… of those… then trans and cis and homosexual and heterosexual… variants? These people exist to create endless permutations in an exercise of complicating obvious ideas to see what sticks, then build data to support. Color me unconvinced).
And then there was when I was fucking (pardon vulgarity) the head of UCLA psychiatry in his Bel Air house. He was very sexy professor daddy handsome, you know the type, conservative, just barely out of reach, but tempting and horny, big dick and hairy chest… you know, pure gay version of Danielle Steel carnip. Tweed jackets, honestly. No pipe.
Then he made a fatal error (those characters always do, right?) He gave me an APBN (American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology) exam for fun - board certification that one could practice psychiatry I suppose in California. We’re talking 1983, we were cozy in his home office, we had been to Santa Monica for lunch in his ivory colored Mercedes ( he was inordinately cathected to) I sat at a sort of artificial Louis 15th desk, one Saturday afternoon and took it.
I enjoy taking tests. Especially peculiar verbal ones, “Woman admitted, presenting dissociative identity disorder and incomplete cathexis of death of small pekinese…” (Oh she was of two minds about her dog, it was annoying but she loved it).
1600 SAT, 36 ACT, Merit Scholar. Watson Fellow, it’s fun to test.
I scored sufficiently to be a certified psychiatrist with one exception, I missed a couple of questions on drug names, I only knew brand names (of course I should have known Thorazine was Chlorpromazine - I do now.)
Naturally he was horrified for many reasons, and I through it was inappropriate to do psychiatric assessments at our stage of fucking. I wasn’t even 20.
He probably should have waited past the 10th fuck for psych exams, and be prepared for someone who finds them trivial. I mean he was head of UCLA psych school.
He couldn’t believe someone could simple reward books from childhood and correlate and synthesize sufficient wisdom for the practicum section( as opposed to recall) I have that effect on men.
That’s why I’m negative on psychiatry and offshoots. What’s certified is childishly simple and obvious, I tend to attract psychiatrists and psychologists and learn dark things, and I find them all simply writer-manque.
The current APBN I’m sure has current nonsense on gender. and little on poor adjustment to puberty.
As always, Sufeitzy, you are very amusing and erudite. I'm sure you are a delightful guest at any dinner party.
I agree-biomedicalization has been an inter-disciplinary enterprise. In the UK and Holland it has been driven actually by clinical psychology (my profession) and the catastrophe of the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock Clinic in London was led by psychologists not psychiatrists. The discussion here though is broadly in agreement that functional psychiatric diagnoses are all logically flawed and that psychiatry has had it fair share of 'great and desperate cures' (from John Bunyan on medical arrogance) from ECT and psychosurgery to anti-depressants and major tranquillizers.