More tales of mistakes from psychiatry ...

I quoted Dr Paul McHugh, a psychiatrist and Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins Hospital, in an earlier post; here I am excerpting from his chapter in Psychiatric Misadventures:

"... the intermingling of psychiatry with contemporary culture is excessive and injures both parties.  During the thirty years of my professional experience, I have witnessed the power of cultural fashion to lead psychiatric thought and practice off in false, even disastrous, directions.  I have become familiar with how these fashions and their consequences caused psychiatry to lose its moorings.  Roughly every ten years, from the mid-1960s on, psychiatric practice has condoned some bizarre misdirection, proving how all too often the discipline has been the captive of the culture."

"This interrelationship of cultural antinomianism and a psychiatric misplaced emphasis is seen at its grimmest in the practice known as sex-reassignment surgery."

"Not uncommonly, a person comes to the clinic and says something like, "As long as I can remember, I've thought I was in the wrong body ... When we ask what he has done about this, the man often says, "I've tried dressing like a woman and feel quite comfortable.  I've even made myself up and gone out in public ... I'm here because all this male equipment is disgusting to me.  I want medical help to change my body ..."  Upon examination it is not difficult to identify other mental and personality difficulties in him .... When you discuss what the patient means by "feeling like a woman," you often get a sex stereotype in return -- something that women physicians note immediately is a male caricature of women's attitudes and interests ..."

"It is not obvious how this patient's feeling that he is a woman trapped in a man's body differs from the feeling of a patient with anorexia nervosa that she is obese despite her emaciated, cachectic state.  We don't do liposuction on anorexics.  Why amputate the genitals of these poor men?  Surely the fault is in the mind not the member."

"That you can get something done doesn't always mean that you should do it."

"Major psychiatric misdirections often share this intimidating mixture of a medical mistake lashed to a trendy idea.  Any challenge to such a misdirection must confront simultaneously the professional authority of the proponents and the political power of fashionable convictions.  Such challenges are not for the fainthearted or inexperienced.  They seldom quickly succeed because they are often misrepresented as ignorant or, in the cant word of our day, uncaring.  Each of the three misdirections I have dealt with in this essay ran for a full decade, despite vigorous criticism.  Eventually the mischief became obvious to nearly everyone and fashion moved on to attach itself to something else."

Dr McHugh wrote this in 1992.  We are well past the ten year mark and transgenderism is still booming.  Does this prove its validity?  No; it proves that many people are making a lot of money at the expense of transgender patients.