Danielle Hunter Made To Sleep On Floor Of Mental Health Facility

A relative of mine spent a number of years as a patient in a mental hospital.  I have known other people who have spent time in various hospitals and institutions.  From their experiences, I have come to the conclusion that here in the US, we take better care of animals we slaughter than of mental-health patients.

It seems that when you go for mental health care, you surrender all of your rights--including your right to saftety, let alone the right to be who you are.  At least, the case of Danielle Hunter could tell us as much.

She is a transgender performer who was admitted to Lakeside Behavior Healthcare in Orlando, FL on 24 March after attempting suicide and, while recuperating in a hospital, saying that she would try again.  The following night, she was removed from her bed and made to sleep on the floor in front of the nurse's station.  

When she asked why she was treated that way, a nurse told her, "If you would like to sleep in a bed, you can sleep in with the men."

What's even more galling about this is that Ms. Hunter has a Florida ID that lists her as female.  

Fortunately for her, she is well-known in the Orlando area--and, apparently, beyond--and therefore has some people with "juice" advocating on her behalf.  That begs the question of what would happen to her if she were some anonymous street kid--or, for that matter, me.

Dr. Torrey Might Have A Good Idea, But What Does It Mean For LGBT People?

This morning, I caught a segment of C-Span's Washington Journal in which Libby Casey interviewed psychiatrist and schizophrenia researcher Dr. E. Fuller Torrey.  

Recently, Dr. Torrey wrote about John F. Kennedy's proposal, 50 years ago, that the Federal government would fund community mental health centers (CMHCs) to replace big mental hospitals run by the states.  (Willowbrook in Staten Island, New York was one of the most infamous examples.)  At the time, most people thought this was a good idea because institutions like Willowbrook were, in essence, warehouses for the mentally ill that often made their patients worse.  Also, the first effective treatments for mental illnesses were becoming available around that time.

However, as Dr. Torrey pointed out, the nature of some of those illnesses--including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder--were not understood as the brain diseases they are rather than as problems that could be talked away through therapy.  So, the de-institutionalization of thousands of mental patients that resulted from JFK's proposal had a terrible, if unintended, consequence:  Many people who need treatment are homeless, in prison or, worse, committing violent crimes.  (He said, in essence, that the last few episodes of mass murder, including the Newtown and Aurora massacres, were "predictable".)  He asserts--correctly, I believe--that some mentally ill people need to stay in a hospital or some similar setting, at least for some period of time and that they need medication or some other form of treatment.  Also, CMHCs were not interested in (and, in many cases, didn't have the wherewithal for) treating the severely ill patients who were released when large state mental hospitals closed down.  Rather, they focused on helping what are sometimes called "the worried well".

Dr. Torrey believes that the Federal government should get out of the business of treating mentally ill people and turn that responsibility back to the states.  He believes that because mental illnesses such as schizophrenia are better understood than they were 50 years ago, and better treatments are available, the states now have the know-how to do a better job than they did back then.  He does advocate Federal oversight, but thinks the states should run the programs.

On the surface, this sounds like a good idea.  However, I find one potential problem.  I'm not quite sure that I completely agree with Dr. Thomas Szaz's notion that there's no such thing as mental illness, but I agree that, at least to some degree, it's whatever people define it to be.  The DSM is an example of this:  According to the DSM-IV, I am mentally ill, but in the upcoming DSM-V, I am not.  

So, if transgenderism--or male homosexuality, or lesbianism--could be re-classified from one edition to another of a reference guide used by clinicians and insurers, who's to say that different states won't have their own definitions of "mental illness"?  Many LGBT people who aren't much older than I am can recall friends, siblings or colleagues who were committed--and even received electroshock treatments--for expressing their love for people of their own gender, or the fact that they aren't the genders indicated on their birth certificates.  In fact, at least two I know personally were institutionalized and were subjected to shock  and drug "therapies".  Who's to say that such things won't happen again--or that we won't be criminalized outright and incarcerated, at least in some states. 

I don't think I'm expressing irrational fears, or even far-out fantasies: After all, sodomy and even wearing things that are considered inappropriate for one's gender are illegal in some jurisdictions.  Dr. Torrey might respond that Federal oversight might ensure consistent standards.  He might be right, but I can envision certain states resisting, in whatever ways they can, any Federal incursion into what they believe to be their domains.

In any event, I think his ideas are certainly worth exploring.  For the most part, I agree with him when he says the states can't do worse than the Federal government has done on the issue.  At least, I know some states can and will do better.  Given its track record before JFK's proposal, I'm not sure that New York, where I life, is one of those states

Healthcare And The Transgender Lost Generation

How many people would take advice from someone who was deemed mentally ill?

And, what would you do if you suffered some sort of disease but no one who has suffered it would talk to you?

Those two questions, I believe, sum up at least one part of the reason why there is the lost generation of transgender pepople I've mentioned in earlier posts.  

In addition to discrimination and other problems, trans people of the 1950's, and even the 1980's, faced the stigma of being classified as mentally ill.  What this meant is that, in some places, they were subjected to treatment much like the kind suffered in some of this country's worst mental institutions.    Or they were referred to the wrong kinds of medical or pyschiatric practitioners for their difficulties.  That is not to mention, of course, all of the jobs that were unavailable to them, no matter their qualifications.

This belief that trans people are mentally ill is one reason why so much emphasis was placed on "going stealth".   Doing so also could prevent a trans person from experiencing discrimination in workplaces, schools, social service agencies and other ares.  

The hostility they faced also deterred many from getting the health care they needed.  This, of course, cut more than a few trans people's lives short:  Such was the story of a few older trans people I knew.  Not that I used the past tense:   They are no longer in this world.

I discovered another effect of what I've just described in 2005-2006, when I was writing a pamphlet on how to access health care for the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund .  Although I knew a fair number of trans people by that time, it was difficult to find older trans people with whom I could discuss such things as long-term health issues trans people experience as they age--or, for that matter, the issues they faced in getting the healthcare they needed.  Of course, I could--and did--talk to the health care providers.  But providers can talk mainly about treatments and therapies; only someone who has experienced those things can talk about coping with the effects of treatments and medications, or about some of the emotional and mental issues someone who's in the process of a gender transition might face.

What the experience also taught me is that trans people of that time didn't have others with whom they could share the wisdom borne of their experiences.  Part of the reason for this is in going "stealth", they could not disclose much about the issues--including discrimination and, in a few cases, outright hostility, they might have faced.  So, in not passing their knowledge and wisdom onto their "children"--because those "children" weren't there--the new generation of trans people I was seeing had no one from whom they could learn.  Thus, in the middle of the last decade, the level of healthcare (excluding surgeries) available to most trans people, and their level of sophistication in accessing it, was really not much (if at all) better than they were two or even three decades earlier.