Quote from: Lori on May 22, 2009, 06:31:20 AM
1) Imagine there are no psychologists 
2) I've always wondered how physical changes fixed mental needs. Its like saying a hungry person is nuts. That mental drive soon becomes a physical need. Either you will eventually eat or you will die. I associate my GID with the likes of hunger. Either I feed it, or it will kill me. I'm not nuts. Anybody with GID knows that. Trying to convince those that don't have it is what's nuts.
1) Because then I'd be outta a job!!
2) O, it happens, more than you might think. Think of PTSD among rape victims and war-zone soldiers, war-zone civilians. Think of road-rage and the rigors of diagnosis of and treatment for mortal illnesses: cancers, HIV disease, etc.
Starvation and roaming aimessly as often occurs in some places also has a psychological effect.
Second- or third-class citizenship is not merely a physically difficult thing often enough, but also a thing that saps and deteriorates the psyche.
Having done a lot of work with homeless people (not talking about "street-drunks" and "crack-heads") but about people who lost jobs, divorced and had no means of support or were just turned out of their lives) I found that within three months or so there were rather obvious psychological effects that they had developed.
It's not so much (except in cases of rape, car-wrecks, being shot, dementia due to illness or the actual brain-damage that's caused by prolonged malnutrition) that there is a direct and immediate connection of the psychological and the physical that takes place over some time. Kinda more like, I like to think, that prolonged running on hard surfaces will often bring "shin-splints" to the runner.
Physical and psychological are pretty much symbiotic as the Buddhist and Hindu psychologists of the past 2500 years recognized. The psychological just tends to be a more subtle physical response than the absolutely physical. Differences of how easily recognizable as material something is.
Does this mean that people with GID in one form or another are "crazy." No. But it does mean that prolonged shame and guilt, prolonged demeaning and shunning do have psychological effects on those who experience them.
The APA needs to understand that societal effects does not mean pathology, but does mean psychological
and physical distress.
Gender-variant/sex variant people need to realize that seeing a therapist or psychologist isn't a marker for being "crazy." The two do not equate at all. But adjusting one's self to one's life is always a very difficult process "on my own." "Two or more heads are definitely better than one in making decisions and evaluating options." Those things are true to life. That's one of the reasons that for therapists and psychologists we are required to undergo supervision on a frequent basis.
Middle-class prejudices about mental health are simply that. Middle-class prejudices.
We, as a group. are not "crazy" or pathological. But we all do have problems that we should recognize are better addressed with a more objective view than we can manage for ourselves.
The end? Therapists, counselors, psychologists and psychiatrists leaving behind whatever trappings of "gatekeeping" remain; and trans-folk freely admitting that a lot of our problems run deeper than we are usually willing to admit. Somewhere in that area there's a better solution.
N~
