Except it isn’t, you’re the one equating symptoms with illnesses.
Having depression isn’t the same as showing depressive symptoms.
I really laughed after that statement. If I didn’t know better, I would swear @gman1225 was being satirical.
I wish he were though
Because they have the exact same hardships in terms of how society treats them.
Transgender people are just the new gay for the far right. They lost the culture war on homosexuals, and society is now accepting gay people. So the guys who made their hay with homophobia have turned to using the threat of transgender people as the new scapegoat.
They suffer the same poor treatment in our society, and we saw that treatment result in high suicide rates with gays. Further, we saw that it was their treatment, not some kind of inherent mental illness or hormonal problem, that was causing that suicide rate with gays, because when you changed their treatment, the suicide rate dropped.
I mean, seriously, step back and compare your position to that held by the people who advocated the same thing for homosexuals. Because they absolutely did. Tons of people said that being gay was a mental illness, and instead of indulging it, we should “save” them with things like conversation therapy.
You’re just taking the same position now, with transgender people.
You should focus more on data, and less on the politics of the situation.
It’s hard to argue when you just make wild assumptions and call them “obvious.” There are real people at issue here, and when you literally perform surgery on their genitals, you don’t want to be making a mistake because “eh it’s basically the same thing, transgender and homosexuality, don’t be a bigot!”
Are you sure you really want to play it like this?
I mean seriously. Consider your next statement carefully.
Lol, what?
And the definition of a major depressive episode is showing depressive symptoms over a prolonged period of time and the circle continues. Since none of us is a psychiatrist (I don’t even play one on the internet). Let’s skip the semantic debate of if astronomically higher the right adjective or if the number is really 8x or some other number.
Would you concede that folks who identify as trans have rates of mental illness that are significantly higher than the general population?
I think you contend that societies treatment causes depression and anxiety. Where as I think it is a mix.
Logically, if you are correct we should a strong co-correlation between how a society treats trans people and their rates of mental illness. So that say trans folks in Scandinavian would have lower rates than those in America, or Canada, Latin America would be next, and it would be worse in the Muslim world.
I haven’t seen that so statistic, I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t exist.
Logically, it should extend that all minority groups would suffer from more depression and anxiety, so that Christian in Iran, and Muslim in America all deal with more discrimination and should be more depressed and anxious. I’d be interested in see that data.
Absolutely, they have higher rates of depression and anxiety. I posted links showing exactly that.
But the fact remains, that the original statement was talking about something different than people who exhibited clinical depression, or have suffered from major depressive episodes.
This is not merely a contention. This is an obvious fact. We all know this. The only difference is that some of us think they can pretend otherwise.
Yes, and they do. In the study i showed above, you even saw it with women vs men.
Blacks and Hispanics in America have statically higher rates of depression than whites. I don’t have data on religious minorites in Iran, but i would be extremely surprised if you didn’t see the same thing.
Because depression and anxiety are not conditions which just magically appear. They aren’t like a cold. They are directly related to our environment and our experiences. We get anxious and depressed about our lives. People who have shittier lives are more anxious and depressed.
And again, we’ve seen that with gays, those psychological issues lessened when society started treating them better.
Really they do? So how would you explain this study which shows the exact opposite?
Disparities in mental health exhibit a decidedly different pattern from disparities in health. In general, minorities, particularly African Americans, have poorer health and health outcomes than do Whites.5 Many studies show that members of minority groups have either lower or equivalent rates of mental disorders as compared with whites. For example, both Hispanics and Blacks have lower lifetime risk of psychiatric disorders than do whites6, 7 in representative samples of the U.S. English-speaking population.
The four Consortium on Psychiatric Epidemiology Studies (CPES) studies funded by the National Institute of Mental Health fielded common core questions and unified sampling weights8 to permit comparisons across U.S. Black (African American, Caribbean) Hispanic (Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican, Other), and Asian (Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Other) groups. These studies improve upon previous surveys because they include large enough samples to study important subgroups of the population, and they are available in Spanish and several Asian languages, as well as English. These studies yielded a surprising finding, given the higher rates of poverty among minority individuals as compared with whites in the U.S…9 With the exception of Puerto Ricans, all subgroups of minorities report lower rates of lifetime mental disorders than do White Americans. Similar advantages exist for presence of a disorder in the past year, although Latino and Black American rates are relatively close to that of white Americans10. Although not part of the CPES, the prevalence of mental disorders has also been studied in two American Indian reservation populations.11 Compared with a nationally representative sample of the U.S. population, Americans Indians were found to be at heightened risk for PTSD and alcohol dependence, but at lower risk for major depression.
I’d have to dig into it to figure out why, that contradicts other studies showing higher rates of depression and mental disorders among minorites.
Conclusions. Major depression and factors associated with depression were more frequent among members of minority groups than among Whites. Elevated depression rates among minority individuals are largely associated with greater health burdens and lack of health insurance, factors amenable to public policy intervention.
Honestly, findings that suggest otherwise seem like they would be suspect, given that we see strong correlations between all kinds of health problems and depression, and we see heightened incidence rates of those health problems in minority groups.
Again, this is fairly intuitive. Having chronic diseases sucks. It’s depressing. It makes you anxious to worry about dying, or going bankrupt from medical bills, or going blind, etc.
And with transgender people, just like it was for gays (and still is, but to a lesser degree) they generally lack the normal support structure that most people have to help deal with hardships. They often cannot depend on family to help them. This, naturally, would result in heightened likelihood of anxiety and depression.
EDIT:
Ah, i believe I figured out where the disparity comes from.
They are controlling for socioeconomic status, i believe. From digging into some of the chains from that paper you cited, that appears to be the case.
And for the problem they have, which is trying to actually see if there is a racial component to mental health, such a control makes sense.
However, from the context of the discussion we are having here, you can ignore the impact of socioeconomic status, because it directly impacts what we are talking about… Which is that having a shittier life increases the likelihood of those mental health issues.
Pretty much my thinking as well.
Keep in mind, unlike the transgender community, many minority groups have strong family and community bonds that can really help with depression. That is a cultural benefit that does not translate to other non racial/cultural minority groups.
Just so I can be clear, is gman trying to push the right-wing talking point that transgenderism is just a mental illness?
I have eventually reached this conclusion.
But whatever it is, his viewpoint is fueled, it seems, by a belief that doctors are so under siege by … er? … that they are committing widespread malpractice by pursuing treatments even a layman (like, indeed, himself!) can tell are ineffective, based on a cursory glance at some out-of-context clinical statistics.
At this point he may as well start writing his own timecube site, as far as I’m concerned.
There is a legitimate argument that SOME transgender people suffer from a type of body dysphoria, but there’s nothing approaching conclusive evidence all or even most transgender people are just suffering from some mental illness.
Again, the commentary is akin to what we used to hear about gay people.
There’s also a huge gap between a medical diagnosis of a ‘mental illness’ and a layman’s meaning of the term.
What we’re seeing is a continuous application of of a ‘Motte and Bailey’ argument.
He’s presenting information which supports a trivially defended argument (the Motte), and then pretends as though that defense justifies a totally separate argument (the Bailey). It’s essentially a repeated bait and switch.
The claim is that we can’t accept transgender people, because their transgenderism is actually a mental illness (the Bailey). When critiqued, he presents evidence for trivially proven statements like, “many transgender people suffer from depression” (the Motte).
It’s almost as if it isn’t worth debating with him. You could present a 100% verified argument to him and I doubt it would change a thing. Not worth it.
It’s almost like Trump supporters are universally terrible people with terrible beliefs, abhorrent morality, and absolutely no redeeming qualities.
Man, if only someone on this board had predicted that 2 years ago or anything.