Quote from: Jane Emily on June 06, 2016, 08:03:19 PM
I think mostly suicidal ideation is a result of clinical depression. Yes we trangsender people try to commit suicide at alarmingly high rates (as I know only too personally as I survived a series of attempts back in 1984) but we are people just like cis people and it seems to me that depression is the root cause of suicide. If one is contemplating suicide I say seek professional help early and often because depression, once the stigma is removed, is quite treatable through a combination of therapy and or medication.
This avoids the question of the "root cause" of that depression.
Depression can be caused by being in an intolerable situation, for instance in a situation in which one's personhood is under constant threat and attack: in the present, in the past ("trauma"), or both. Leelah Alcorn is an example of someone whose personhood was under constant, persistent attack, so it's not surprising that she killed herself. Whether you say that it was "depression" that led her to kill herself or "oppression," the root cause was the soul-destroying treatment she had received and continued to receive.
"Therapy and medication" only work when something effective is done about the root cause of the depression, which for trans people is the oppression they suffer under. One strong bit of evidence for that is the recent study that showed that trans children that receive love and appropriate support actually do better than the population at large, wherease those that don't receive it have that high rate of suicide and suicidal ideation (not to mention self-destructive behaviors) that everyone talks about.
This is BTW a long-standing criticism of conventional mental health treatment: it ignores the effect of society and oppression. For instance, black people were routinely diagnosed as psychotic for their "delusion" that people were out to get them, a diagnosis that ignored the all-too-obvious fact that the society they lived in (the USA) was in fact out to get them, and thus their "paranoia" was based in fact, not delusion.
In my case, my suicidal levels of depression dropped dramatically but did not go away once I moved away from home, a home that was clearly toxic, though I'm still trying to figure out in what way. Decades of therapy after that and several multi-year courses of medication did not make a dent in my depression. What
has made a difference?
1. I allowed myself to express my gender-variance and, more recently, started to transition.
2. Reimagining my childhood as it wasn't, but should have been if the adults around me had actually thought what was happening to me mattered.
Both aspects were about dealing with past and present oppressions.
I've recently gone off medication, after several months of HRT, and the suicidal thoughts are mostly gone. They only come back when I'm under a lot of stress, which I think isn't surprising.
