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Finally some positive news on the gender front. The Tavistock Centre in the UK is to be shut down because they are not adequately helping the children sent there. The BBC reports –
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“Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust has been told to shut the clinic by spring after it was criticised in an independent review.
Instead, new regional centres will be set up to “ensure the holistic needs” of patients are fully met, the NHS said.
The trust said it supported plans for a new model due to a rise in referrals.
The changes will take place after an independent review, led by Dr Hilary Cass, said the Tavistock clinic needed to be transformed.
She said the current model of care was leaving young people “at considerable risk” of poor mental health and distress, and having one clinic was not “a safe or viable long-term option”.
Challenging Gender identity is career kryptonite for mental health care professionals. Speaking out against it carries a high social cost as transgender activists and those on board with the anti-reality transgender ideology have made the the scientific debate and conversation around the issue nearly untouchable. The similarities to religious dogma and how heretics were punished/excommunicated is apt in this situation. It took an independent review and court cases to shine the light on dubious practices – gender affirmation therapy for instance – and bring them into question.
“There were rising referrals and a long waiting list but at the same time some former staff were raising concerns about the way it operated.
Then, former patient Keira Bell went to court saying she had not been challenged enough about her decision at 16 to take drugs that began her transition from female to male – a decision she later regretted.
Earlier this year, Dr Cass’s report said there was a lack of understanding about why the type of patients the clinic was seeing was changing, with more female to male patients and more autistic children. Dr Cass also highlighted inconclusive evidence to back some of the clinical decision making.”
Yeah, the gender-magic has run afoul of good evidence based medical practice –
In an interim report earlier this year, Dr Cass said:
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The service was struggling to deal with spiralling waiting lists
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It was not keeping “routine and consistent” data on its patients
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Health staff felt under pressure to adopt an “unquestioning affirmative approach”
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Once patients are identified as having gender-related distress, other healthcare issues they had, such as being neurodivergent, “can sometimes be overlooked”
Most of the current psychological treatment of gender disorders has been warped by transgender ideology and activists. Gender dysphoria is the only body morphic disorder that has a affirmative care approach.
What does this look like? Well consider Anorexia – the idea behind most treatments is to guide the patient back to a body image that comports with reality and to dispel the illusions and misconceptions of being “fat” while in fact being severely underweight and malnourished. Affirmative therapy would agree with the anorexic’s self diagnosis and would look for ways for them to flourish in their quest to be thin…
Gender affirmation therapy starts with the preordained conclusion that the child or person in question perception of their gender and body are correct and work toward that goal.
Ludicrous.
“Dr David Bell – not related to Keira Bell – is a former consultant psychiatrist at the Tavistock NHS Foundation Trust, where he raised concerns. He said it was a “good thing” the service was closing down.
Proper funding was needed for mental health services for children and adolescents, he said.
He told the BBC: “Some children have got the double problem of living with the wrong treatment, and the original problems weren’t addressed – with complex problems like trauma, depression, large instances of autism.”
The tide is beginning to turn against this wave anti-science, transgender ideology, and not a moment too soon.
Change is hard. Always.
We are a social species, seeking qualified help from another person, professional or otherwise, is almost always a good plan. Mary Lundorff says this about grief:
“People experiencing complicated grief often avoid people, situations or objects that remind them of the permanence of their loss, so some version of exposure is often used. Exposure might include retelling the story of the loss or identifying particularly disturbing memories that the person tends to avoid, and then gradually revisiting these memories within and between treatment sessions. The final stages of therapy are often future-focused, working towards resumption of life without the deceased. This element emphasises establishing and maintaining a healthy bond to the deceased, including an acceptance that life continues, and targeted help to reengage in meaningful relationships.
The saying ‘time heals all wounds’ is only partially correct because, for severely inflamed wounds, time is not the solution. It is necessary to see a doctor and receive specialised treatment to aid the healing process. Bereaved individuals experiencing complications in their grief process often describe their situation as extremely numbing, overwhelming and debilitating. As shown in the case of Amy, one’s social network is a crucial factor. While an understanding and supportive network can act as a protective factor against prolonged grief disorder, withdrawal from friends and family can create social isolation and increase feelings of meaninglessness, contributing to the development of prolonged grief disorder. It is essential to know that professional help is available. If you read this and recognise the symptoms of prolonged grief disorder in someone you know – or perhaps in yourself – seek out professional support because time does not heal all grief.”
“The psychopath’s response to people who suffer indicates that what we recognise as morality might be grounded not simply in positive, prosocial emotions but also in negative, stressful and self-oriented ones. This is not some cuddly version of empathy, but a primitive aversive reaction that seemingly has little to do with our caring greatly for the humanity of others.
Yet what exposes our common humanity more than the fact that I become personally distressed by what happens to you? What could better make me grasp the importance of your suffering? The personal part of empathic distress might be central to my grasping what is so bad about harming you. Thinking about doing so fills me with alarm. Arguably, it’s more important that I curb my desire to harm others for personal gain than it is for me to help a person in need. Social psychology research has focused on how we’re moved to help others, but that’s led us to ignore important aspects of ethics. Psychopathy puts personal distress back in the centre of our understanding of the psychological underpinnings of morality.
The last lesson we can learn concerns whether sentimentalists or rationalists are right when it comes to interpretations of the moral deficits of psychopaths. The evidence supports both positions. We don’t have to choose – in fact, it would be silly for us to do so. Rationalist thinkers who believe that psychopaths reason poorly have zoomed in on how they don’t fear punishment as we do. That has consequences down the line in their decision making since, without appropriate fear, one can’t learn to act appropriately. But on the side of the sentimentalists, fear and anxiety are emotional responses. Their absence impairs our ability to make good decisions, and facilitates psychopathic violence.
Fear, then, straddles the divide between emotion and reason. It plays the dual role of constraining our decisions via our understanding the significance of suffering for others, and through our being motivated to avoid certain actions and situations. But it’s not clear whether the significance of fear will be palatable to moral philosophers. A response of distress and anxiety in the face of another’s pain is sharp, unpleasant and personal. It stands in sharp contrast to the common understanding of moral concern as warm, expansive and essentially other-directed. Psychopaths force us to confront a paradox at the heart of ethics: the fact that I care about what happens to you is based on the fact I care about what happens to me.”
We’ve all experienced the inner hardening, and turning away when faced with another human being in need. Of course it isn’t indicative of us being a psychopath, but the ability to realize that ethical distance is trait we all share. I realize the pain and suffering of people who are starving, but they are far away and I can turn away and ignore their suffering and get along with my life.
Seems kinda shitty once you think about it, and the fact that most people do it doesn’t lessen the gravity of this particular ethical failure. Yet, the behaviour will persist, a dubious solution to the real life situations that run up against our moral understanding of the world.
This sort of ethical dilemma is illustrated in the series Breaking Bad. I’m almost done (two episodes left) watching Breaking Bad, and the moral path Walter White chooses to walk seems to illustrate the how muddy ‘good ethical behaviour’ gets once it hits the real word.
“To be clear, a moral injury is not a psychiatric diagnosis. Rather, it’s an existential disintegration of how the world should or is expected to work—a compromise of the conscience when one is butted against an action (or inaction) that violates an internalized moral code. It’s different from post-traumatic stress disorder, the symptoms of which occur as a result of traumatic events. When a soldier at a checkpoint shoots at a car that doesn’t stop and kills innocents, or when Walter White allows Jesse’s troublesome addict girlfriend to die of an overdose to win him back as a partner, longstanding moral beliefs are disrupted, and an injury on the conscience occurs.”
What quality makes people bounce back from a moral injury, or turn further toward questionable moral choices? We’d all like to think we belong to the class of upstanding, moral citizens – but how long does that last once the unkind vicissitudes of life go into overdrive?
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