The Psychiatric Times wrote:
Gender Identity Disorder: Has Accepted Practice Caused Harm?Salon reports;
Lois Wingerson
As transgender activists protested outside the American Psychiatric Association (APA) meeting, speakers at the meeting were presenting on the same topic: gender identity disorder (GID). Some of their words would add clinical weight to the political slogans.
…Sidney W. Ecker, MD, a former clinical professor of urology at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, Washington, DC, and chief of urology at the Washington DC VA Medical Center, was scheduled to review studies documenting that factors that influence gender identity are present before birth. While social and hormonal influences act later during childhood, he wrote, “gender identity is determined before and persists despite these effects.
Diane Ehrensaft, PhD, a professor at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, Calif, had a message more difficult for psychiatrists to hear. “The mental health profession has been consistently doing harm to children who are not ‘gender normal,’ and they need to retrain,” she told Psychiatric Times. Ehrensaft has specialized in therapy for foster children as well as for children with gender issues.
…
A program at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC, takes a different approach, offering in-person and online support groups to help families adjust to and help their children work through their own gender identity issues. Edgardo Menvielle, MD, MSHS, director of the program, was curious whether children seen in Washington have different mental health profiles than kids involved with the Toronto program. Based on Child Behavior Checklist ratings, he reported that the Washington youth showed “less pathological tendencies,” suggesting that peer support may “lessen manifestations of pathology in the child.
…
“We got homosexuality out of the DSM because of protests at the APA,” she [Diane Ehrensaft] pointed out. “Now it’s time to do the same with GID.”
Are transgender people mentally ill?Medpage, a news service for “physicians that provides a clinical perspective on the breaking medical news that their patients are reading” reported…
Wednesday, May 20, 2009 05:38 PDT
Judy Berman
The LGBT community has had a long, often painful relationship with the psychiatric profession. Until 1974, when the American Psychiatric Association (APA) voted to remove the diagnosis from the second edition of its "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM), the organization maintained that homosexuality was a mental illness. The change came slowly, after years of protest and debate.
…
On Monday night, protesters gathered outside the APA meeting at a "Reform GID Now!" demonstration. As the association's membership works to revise the DSM for a fifth edition, activists want the APA to select a more representative working group on gender identity. Many in the transgender community are upset that Kenneth Zucker, psychologist-in-chief at Toronto's Center for Addiction and Mental Health, has been chosen to lead the DSM-V Task Force on Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders…
APA: Major Changes Loom for Bible of Mental HealthI believe that it is time to remove GID from the realm of a mental illness to that of a medical disease. To remove the sigma of a mental illness that the right wing fanatics use against us and to recognize that a persons gender is determined in utero before ever taking their first breath.
By John Gever, Senior Editor, MedPage Today
Published: May 19, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO, May 19 -- Some familiar disorders may be dropped and diagnostic criteria for others are in line for substantial revision in the forthcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V).
Schizoaffective disorder and gender identity disorder are among those that may be on the chopping block, according to members of the working groups leading the revision who spoke here at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting.
…
Since it was first published in 1952, the DSM has provided the definitive word on what is and is not mental illness, with enormous influence within medicine and on the world beyond.
The elimination of homosexuality as a mental illness in the third DSM edition issued in the 1970s, for example, is now widely viewed as a watershed development in changing society's view from outright hostility to varying degrees of acceptance.
DSM-V is on track to be published in 2012…
Gender identity gets attention
One DSM issue that is drawing close attention from outside the psychiatric community is what to do with gender identity disorder.
The condition -- in which people, often during childhood, realize that their biological gender does not match what their minds tell them -- is now included in DSM-IV as a sexual dysfunction alongside pedophilia and sexual sadism.
Not surprisingly, transgender individuals and the groups representing them are lobbying hard to have gender identity disorder dropped from DSM-V.
…
As described by its chairwoman, Peggy Cohen-Kettinis, Ph.D., of VU University in Amsterdam, the group is facing three main options: keep gender identity disorder approximately as it is, jettison it entirely, or change the name and diagnostic criteria.
Dr. Cohen-Kettinis said the group was nearing a decision, but both she and fellow group member Jack Drescher, M.D., a New York-based psychiatrist and prolific author on sexuality and gender, were noncommittal on which way the group was leaning.
A number of speakers at the forum represented the transgender community and most pleaded for option two.
Rebecca Allison, M.D., a Phoenix-based cardiologist and transsexual, said the ideal would be to drop the condition from DSM but keep it in the International Classification of Diseases system as a medical condition, with a name like "gender variance."
Such a move would make it more likely that insurance companies would cover transgender transition services such as hormonal treatments and surgery, she and other speakers said.
No comments:
Post a Comment