Does Mental Health need to be higher on the agenda?

I’ll never forget a mother writing on Facebook that she finally had the daughter she’d always wanted when her son decided he was a girl. A skirt, long hair and fake breasts doesn’t make your son a daughter. Perhaps the mental health of the family needs to be considered in terms of young people who want to transition. They are not making this decision in isolation of family values and experiences. The mother was chatting to me at an event and she was very opinionated and a force to be reckoned with. Strong narcissistic traits came through loud and clear. I have no idea about his dad because I did not meet him but the Facebook posts from him were welcoming of the transition. His best mate has long hair so it’s not like having long hair was going against his social circle's rules in any way.

Oh it’s a fantastic book - Hannah Barnes is a brilliant investigative writer. Do go check out the podcast too - they interview so many very interesting people. They even managed to get an interview with the creators of the Dutch Protocol - that one is crazy.

@TwoLoonsAndASprout

Thank you for the explanations! It's really sad and horrible that talk therapy for young people was replaced with affirmation protocols. I can imagine that at the very least, if I'd received such talk therapy as a kid, I would not have understood what the point of it was, but as an adult I wish I'd gone through it - if for no other reason than to know for sure that every other avenue was thoroughly explored.

I've got my eye on "Time to Think". Shouldn't be long before I read it now...

So if we could apply the same solution as homosexuality to identifying as trans, what would that look like?

I understand the acceptance of people wearing whatever clothes they choose to wear and present as they wish.

I cannot accept a pretence of 'transing' ie crossing into the other sex group, which allows access to other sex services.

The problem is that you can accept someone is homosexual without having to comply with any part of that sexuality or participate in it. Transexuality seems to require participation of others who are not transexual - that makes it tricky.

Your last sentence is the key. There used to be such therapists - in fact, before the proliferation of the Dutch Protocol, that was the only way that gender questioning children and youth were treated. Some of these therapists worked at the child gender clinic at the Tavistock in London. Many of them were horrified by the immediate affirmation protocols that were being introduced - they joked, blackly, that the Tavistock was “transing away all the gay kids in the UK”. Same with autistic youth. But when they voiced these concerns, they were shut down, shut out and dismissed. And so the state of therapy in the UK became such that if you wanted to offer non-affirmative therapy, you had to do so in secret, or from overseas.

Hannah Barnes’s book “Time to Think” is very eye-opening on this. The podcast Gender, A Wider Lens, also talks to a lot of former Tavistock therapists, and other pre-Dutch Protocol therapists. They existed, they were just hounded underground.

Really sorry to hear that, getting the right support for any mental health problem is so important.

Exactly. I'd love to be questioned and challenged by doctors or psychologists, and maybe to figure out where my dysphoria came from, and if possible to cure it. But there simply are NO such professionals out there - that I know of anyway. Among other reasons because TRAs don't want such studies to be done, ever.

Having known someone well with gender dysphoria from a very early age, it’s an incredibly difficult thing to have. More studies need to be done between dysphoria, trans and anorexia. There’s a lot of overlap and not that many effective solutions.

Absolutely, I know and acknowledge I'm male, and I've destroyed what is otherwise a healthy male body. The stupidity of that is certainly not lost on me. It has helped mentally, so I wouldn't say it was pointless, but in a world where some people are born without healthy functioning bodies, it seems ridiculous to be damaging mine deliberately.

I've read brain scans are an interesting one, some studies have shown, in relatively controlled circumstances, that some (small) parts of gender dysphoric brains do look anomalous. If I'm not mistaken one study suggested that the part of the brain that deals with self-perception is statistically anomalous compared with healthy controls. Perhaps one day we can find some medicine to bring that into line.

The comparison with homosexuality is always an interesting one. Certainly homosexuality was pathologised in the past, so it makes sense to be wary of making the same mistake again. For me, the big difference is the best 'treatment' for homosexuality is just to let people get on with it and encourage society to be tolerant, whereas the best 'treatment' for gender dysphoria is a relatively dangerous set of surgeries and other medical interventions. That's a very different action! A simpler safer treatment would be preferable, whereas no better 'treatment' for homosexuality is needed.

So a better treatment which involved treating the underlying psychological issue rather than modifying the physical body would be a much better option for you, if it existed.

But if it's not being researched, it will never exist.

Indeed. I am part of several IRL trans groups, and there is a strong sentiment to that effect running amongst some of us since the SC ruling. Most trans people of that opinion seem to believe that there are those of us who really are "women trapped in mens bodies" or vice versa, and that our cause has been taken over by those who aren't.

I certainly don't believe in gendered souls or anything of the sort personally, I do just think we have this mental illness gender dysphoria. Transition seems to help some, and it's the best medicine has come up with so far, but it leaves a lot to be desired!

See, this is where I think the ones who get a kick out of it (for want of better words) have really done a number on people with genuine dysphoria.

They want to be in women's spaces with women and force everyone to refer to them as though they are women, so the message they have gone with is that being trans is something to be celebrated, affirmed and accepted without exception, rather than an illness to be treated or cured (making a completely false equivalence with homosexuality).

That does a real disservice to people who are really struggling and wish they didn't have dysphoria. It means that dysphoria can longer be acknowledged and discussed as a mental illness, which means that nobody is researching how to actually treat or cure the underlying psychological condition that causes it.

Just wanted to chip in on this one too and completely echo what @Seethlaw said. 100% absolutely yes I wished for so long that that was an option. All I wanted was to be a 'normal man'. I tried what I could think of to deal with it, but in the end I've given in.

I absolutely view my gender dysphoria (more like dysmorphia for me) as a mental illness. I'm transitioning because I couldn't cope, and I see transition as the best known 'treatment', but it's a pretty lousy treatment! It does genuinely seem to have helped so far, but it's a huge trade-off of one set of problems for another.

I also feel incredibly guilty about transitioning, I feel like I'm prioritising myself over those around me and I really hate that. Particularly the thought of making women uncomfortable is something I worry a lot about, it's not fair to them that I might be doing that. I try my best not to cause problems, so e.g. don't use women's facilities.

You can improve mental health with really simple things. Stuff like ensuring healthy working conditions. We talk about health and safety in terms of physical risks, we don't talk about them in terms of psychological so much.

We are seeing a 'crisis' in younger people. And they are being blamed for lacking resilience. However I also think there's a discussion to be had there in terms of demands placed on workers. Working in retail or hospitality isn't the same - in part due to shift working, in part due to rising antisocial behaviour to name just two factors. Commuting is harder and longer. Local areas don't have the same centres for relaxation. We build entire estates which are no more than dormitories which are disconnected from community and having no facilities. There's nothing to do.

We are recognising this concept of increasing loneliness.

It sounds really unfashionable but we had the local pub and the local church which forfilled many of the roles. Where this still exists we have communities which are affluent and sought after as places to live. For good reason.

People are turning to political groups as a substitution for this. In my twenties I found solace in the music scene - but that too has disappeared.

Strangely enough we are seeing a pattern in terms of those identifying as trans - they are those who don't fit in. Overall we aren't really seeing a pattern of the lad down the pub who loves and plays footy on a weekly basis being the one who transitions to 'Gloria'. That's your clue about a lot of this. Those who feel they fit in, don't have a sense of something being wrong with them.

I was using that as an example for those children that see it on social media and think it’s cool, I’m obviously not suggesting that would be appropriate for those who are suffering genuine mental distress.

I know several people who have children who fade in and out of this ideology, one in particular is a girl, when she has a boyfriend she’s very much a girl, overtly and stereotypically feminine, and when she’s single she’s a boy, crew cut hair, boys clothes and the male version of her name. She’s no more trans than I am, and some strong parenting wouldn’t go amiss. I say this as the mother of an autistic son, he could have gone down all sorts of rabbit holes had we not been on the ball with social media limiting.

Agree with Red Mental health is complex and there is no real conversation about the environment that we as a society are creating and how - in my opinion - it's usually the opposite to the type of society needed for good human mental health.

Technology more often divides than unites IMO. A good example is older people like my parents are essentially excluded from being able to live life by themselves even when they could if they could do things the old fashioned way (bank branches etc) because they can't cope with all the apps and online forms foisted upon them without consent. So they suffer a complete loss of agency in their lives, in my opinion hastening their mental and physical decline, and my sibling and I end up doing it all, massively increasing the mental load upon already busy people.

Half the time now, lonely people can't even speak to a human being it's AI bots.

And mental health 'support' often means pills rather than talking therapy because it's cheaper.

In the meantime there is little to no check on the 1% exploiting the working classes (e.g. care homes being for profit and care work not professionalised and paid appropriately, and some people getting rich rather than the money going to good quality care).

My employer - private sector - has taken to sending out trite 'wellbeing tips' which without exception always make me feel WORSE. Because they're so obviously insincere and a tick box exercise. And it's particularly bad when they make a company wide change that makes my job / life harder then ignore my feedback / complaint and then send me a 'wellbeing tip' about going outside to get fresh air. How about good working conditions and adequate pay?

There was a radio segment on recently about getting long term disabled back to work where I was screaming at the radio because the person being interviewed was saying 'working will improve people's mental health'. Hmmm, not necessarily it very much depends on the way your employer treats you. Care work is bloody hard work - and often the carers are not treated well.

I doubt Sandie Peggie or Jennifer Melle or Karen Danson had their mental health improved by working in the environment they had to work in.

However, all this may be true but nevertheless I think there's a special place in hell for activists who've sought to convince vulnerable children that their parents (who genuinely love them) 'hate' them if they use the wrong fecking pronoun, which is a very difficult mental task. It's deliberately creating fragility and poor mental health.

Heh. I endured too strong parenting, where my mother would react exactly like that even when I was factually right, so that hits a bit too close to home. And in my case, it wouldn't have worked anyway; it would just have told me that this was yet another thing I couldn't discuss with my mother, and had to wait until I was an adult to deal with on my own. But to each their own.

I agree, I believe that for young people who aren’t gay it’s mostly a social contagion, teenagers always want to mark themselves out as being different and with something like this it’s also that their parents cannot comprehend it, then it’s all the better. This is where strong parenting comes in, the best response I’ve seen to it is this -

ifunny.co/picture/mummy-i-think-i-ma-boy-well-youre-not-and-lY7v1W0XA

I'm not surprised. Children and adolescents don't typically have the self-knowledge necessary to precisely pinpoint what their issue is. They would need a whole lot of neutral guidance to discriminate between the various possibilities.

Personally, in the case of children, adolescents, and even very young adults, I'm absolutely against any hormonal or surgical treatment, because I consider that they cannot possibly fully consent, since they don't understand what they would be giving up or sacrificing. At those ages, it's also very difficult to determine how much of their self-beliefs comes from themselves, and how much from their environment.

Body dysphoria in adolescents resolves itself after puberty in approximately 85% of cases, given the appropriate treatment and not affirmative medical intervention. Those young people mostly turn out to be same sex attracted. I don’t have any data for people who are well into adulthood who suddenly say they’re trans.

@JamieCannister I don't think anyone gets through life without feeling unhappy or insecure - I think that's an unrealistic expectation.

I would like our society, our healthcare system, our education system and our workplaces to treat people better as I think problems in these areas are causing increased unhappiness and insecurity to us all.

I'm not keen on breaking people and then fixing them. The fix is never quite as good as building strong people in the first place. (which needs strong families, strong societies)

One of the things in Hannah Barnes book about the Tavi was how there really wasn't any support network and help in terms of mental health and talking things through which wasn't predetermined in the outcome being transition. They would medicalise within 4 sessions. Therein lies a huge problem.

Mental health support is expensive. It might need to be life long. And the 'solution' we come up with is generally a block of 6 - 12 sessions if you are lucky.

The reality is a lot of it comes down to a loss of community and just generalised social networks which have been massively disrupted and destroyed by various factors over the last 50 years.

We also aren't making the connection between anoerxia and gender dysphoria and the rise in the use of filters and photoshopping as younger generations have become more image obsessed. Before this affected girls but there has been a massive uptick in boys with steroid abuse and the gym bunny look.

So I'm inclined to say we aren't looking at this as an issue of society and mental health (without pathologicalising it) in terms of support network building and technology change. And we arent looking at the problems of overmedicalisation as somehow being the solution to the issues we are seeing.

We need for normalisation in terms of whats normal to 'need' in terms of support and sources of that to come from none health institutionalisation. We need to look at local community building in various ways. And the binning of the vanity culture.

@Seethlaw That's an interesting perspective.. Thank you for discussing it.

@Ohfuckrucksack

For me, it's not to do with feelings of safety. Possibly, it might have to do with feelings of responsibility. Like, there was no man at home (neither my father nor that of my half-sister stayed around), so I felt like I had to be the man of the house. So maybe that's where it came from? Or maybe my mother had assumed I'd be a boy throughout her pregnancy, and I picked up on that? I don't know. I only know the consequences.

I had a child, but it didn't change anything.