29,710,231,440; the number of people who identify as somewhere on the LGBT+ spectrum. 11,88,409,257; the number of the people who are LGBT+ and have a diagnosed mental illness/disorder. Some people believe that these numbers have no correlation or that they couldn’t possibly have anything to do with each other. I believe though, that while belonging to a LGBT+ group may not cause mental illness, the combination of the stigma around mental disorders and certain LGBT+ groups and the lack of tolerance our society still has today certainly should not be discounted as a factor. If “therapy” still existed that used behavioral, cognitive, psychoanalytic behavioral, cognitive, and psychoanalytic methods to prove to you that something as natural as
…show more content…
While people may believe that stigma and discrimination are the same thing, they are very different. A stigma against something can cause un-informed, accidentally ignorant comments, while flat-out discrimination causes things like hate crimes such as people being beaten up, raped, or murdered. Just in 2015, there have been over 1000 cases of reported hate crimes in the United States alone. Hate crimes are fueled by intolerance that has never been necessary. There have even been laws protecting hate crimes in the past. Governments, I believe, are partially responsible for a part of this intolerance. Gay marriage hasn’t been legal in America for a year, conversion therapy is legal in 45 states and protected in 6, and there are still 77 countries where being gay is illegal. There have been many reported cases of conversion therapy where the patient has committed suicide as a cause of the therapy that has no proof of working. In the one and only study where it was said that conversion therapy worked, the person who conducted it, Robert Spitzer, retracted his study saying that it was based only off opinion instead of fact or observation. Homosexuality was still counted as a mental illness up until 4 years ago! Even recently, in North Carolina, our state government has issued what is basically an anti-trans bill. This bill (House Bill two, often abbreviated to HB2) requires that transgender people, regardless of the surgeries they may or may have had, to use public bathrooms that correspond to the sex on their birth certificate. Many people believe that this was out of fear that a trans women, who they believe is still a man, would try to come into the women’s restroom and harass women or children. The only time I’ve heard of harassment in a public restroom is from cis-gendered people harassing transgender people or people of the same gender
While people may believe that stigma and discrimination are the same thing, they are very different. A stigma against something can cause un-informed, accidentally ignorant comments, while flat-out discrimination causes things like hate crimes such as people being beaten up, raped, or murdered. Just in 2015, there have been over 1000 cases of reported hate crimes in the United States alone. Hate crimes are fueled by intolerance that has never been necessary. There have even been laws protecting hate crimes in the past. Governments, I believe, are partially responsible for a part of this intolerance. Gay marriage hasn’t been legal in America for a year, conversion therapy is legal in 45 states and protected in 6, and there are still 77 countries where being gay is illegal. There have been many reported cases of conversion therapy where the patient has committed suicide as a cause of the therapy that has no proof of working. In the one and only study where it was said that conversion therapy worked, the person who conducted it, Robert Spitzer, retracted his study saying that it was based only off opinion instead of fact or observation. Homosexuality was still counted as a mental illness up until 4 years ago! Even recently, in North Carolina, our state government has issued what is basically an anti-trans bill. This bill (House Bill two, often abbreviated to HB2) requires that transgender people, regardless of the surgeries they may or may have had, to use public bathrooms that correspond to the sex on their birth certificate. Many people believe that this was out of fear that a trans women, who they believe is still a man, would try to come into the women’s restroom and harass women or children. The only time I’ve heard of harassment in a public restroom is from cis-gendered people harassing transgender people or people of the same gender