DO HEADSHRINKERS PRACTISE EUGENICS ON LGBTQI+ PEOPLE?

 Except from AN INTERNATIONAL HISTORY OF LGBTQI+ACTIVISM, in preparation

                     

My selective history of psychiatry focuses, in part, on the history in Edinburgh, but also on international material collated during my years twelve or so years campaigning campaigning against problematic modern psychiatry e.g. as convenor of the Facebook page Mental Health Discussions Edinburgh. The excellent work on depressive disorders by Professor Joanne Moncrieff at UCL has epitomised the need for, albeit belated, change during the 2020s.

While I am a retired Bayesian statistician, there is an almost complete dearth of statistics in this, my third book. I indeed refer to my very own philosophy:

Most statistics are potentially misleading, but some could be useful for making qualitative assessments.

To give three examples:

(1) It is very difficult to use a census to count the number of individuals in a population, since undercounts can be quite sizeable and related, for instance, to social deprivation, Furthermore, the population may itself be undefined or time varying, e.g. because of migration, immigration, birth and death.

(2) The Kinseyian 1948 ‘estimate’ that 10% of the American male population was gay is at best a ball-park figure owing to (a) lack of replicated randomisation at the experimental design stage (b) lack of precise definition of gayness, and (c) the quite acceptable propensity of gay men to lie when posed with the question, owing to fright about possible repercussions. The ‘true percentage’ could be anything between 1% and 37%.

(3) My subjective assertion that ‘gay men (or women) are five times more likely to have at some time experienced mental health issues when compared with those who are not gay’ cannot be empirically validated for a host of reasons. It nevertheless provides us, in qualitative terms with a potentially useful working hypothesis.

If 20% of a male population have at some time experienced mental health issues, then the working hypotheses in (2) and (3) would together imply that the proportion of gay men in this population who have experienced mental health issues is 5/7 whereas the proportion of not gay men who have experienced mental health issues is only 1/7.

Consequently any employment policy or over-harsh psychiatric treatment that discriminates against or harms men who’ve had mental health issues would tend to discriminate against or harm a large majority of gay men. In particular, the psychiatric profession may currently be effectively practising eugenics on our gay populations, Such qualitative assessments justify the intersectional nature of this book.

The preceding calculations can be justified by a simple application of Bayes Theorem and the Law of Total Probability. See pp 76-67 of Bayesian Methods (Thomas Leonard and John Hsu, C.U.P. 1999)