http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-walker-baron/diagnostic-labels_b_2363555.html
From
The Huffington Post
Physicians treat disease by isolating symptoms and prescribing
curative approaches to those symptoms hoping for a return to
pre-morbidity. Once a condition is labeled "disease," it warrants
treatment. That's the way it goes in our medical models of health care.
Living in the shadow of this medical model, imagine discovering, in
adolescence for example, that you suffered from a disease -- and that
you had, in fact, suffered from this disease since birth. The
particular disease from which you suffered was "homosexuality," for
which there must in the medical model be a cure even though no cause had
yet to be identified and the symptoms were primarily feeling feelings
and exhibiting behaviors found by those proclaiming you "sick" to be
irritating and inexplicable.
This new medical modeled information would possibly explain some
things for you. It might, for example, explain why so many people
appeared to despise you. Diseases are like that, it seems. People
don't want to be around them and certainly not around people who
"suffer" from them. They -- either the disease or the person with the
disease -- might be contagious. Thus we created sanitariums and
hospital quiet zones and even remote islands of respite -- to remind
ourselves as well as the diseased that separation is the essence of
care.
As a distinct medical modeled concept, homosexuality is
relatively recent.
The German word homosexualität first appeared in a pamphlet published
in Leipzig in 1869. The word homosexual did not even enter the English
language for another twenty years when modern medicine and especially
psychiatry began calling it an illness and especially a mental illness.
This new classification and elevation of homosexuality to a categorized
disease tossed barrels and barrels of fuel onto the already fierce
flames fanned by religious dogma and social fanaticism. Jumping
headlong into those flames was the newly-empowered "homophobia" and the
fire blazed out of control with laws ensuring that society be protected
from the scourge of this not only moral outrage but now classifiable
disease which, of course in the medical model, warranted treatment.
And so it came to pass that in adolescence you discovered the name of
the disease from which you apparently suffered. This new information
about the status of your health -- or rather the status of disease from
which you just learned you suffered -- explained a lot of things but
couldn't help you live a vibrant and proud life because despite horrific
and horrifying attempts at cure, there appeared to be no panacea for
your medical modeled predicament. You learned to hide the status of
your health. You either pretended you were disease-free or flew in the
face of polite society, announced your disease, and suffered the
consequences of daring to live your life in spite of your
now-obviously-compromised physical, mental and, of course, moral and
spiritual well-being.
Time passed and scientific inquiry and logic at least in the disease
of "homosexuality" began to prevail. At the American Psychological
Association's Council of Representatives in August 1987, the inclusion
of "homosexuality" in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD)
was rejected and all APA members were urged to no longer use any ICD or
DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) codings.[1]
And on May 17, 1990, when it approved the new version of the World
Health Organization's ICD-10, the World Health Assembly removed
homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.
Dr. Mirta Roses Periago, director of the Pan American Health Organization,
told
the United Nations in May 2012, "Since homosexuality is not a disorder
or a disease, it does not require a cure." And yet you were left
recovering from the ravages of a disease that never existed but that
everyone accused you of bringing on yourself. Very few people either
wanted to or were capable of tossing your voluminous and completely
bogus medical records into the trash and embracing you as a person who
was always excitingly, beautifully without blemish.
Almost as quickly as you discovered you suffered from a disease named
even by the World Health Organization, you discovered the disease no
longer existed -- had, in fact, never existed. There were no apologies
offered by the medical establishment. No one came to you and said,
"Sorry we empowered the religious and moral fundamentalists to demonize
you even further. Sorry we became accomplices in deepening the stigma
so long stamped on your lives." No. No one came to you. Instead, the
medical community simply removed your disease from its roll.
It's all too easy to label as diagnostic any facet of the enormously
complicated gamut of human emotion and behavior we do not understand or
do not endorse. This is especially true in these days of increased
anger and violence and fear. The harm done by these labels wounds us
all.
References:
[1] Fox, R.E. (1988) Proceedings of the American Psychological
Association, Incorporated, for the year 1987: Minutes of the Annual
meeting of the Council of Representatives. American Psychologist, 43,
508-531.
