mental health
Art Is Not Therapy
Something is flattened when our understanding of art is asked to serve the logic of a medical diagnosis, which sees the messiness of the human condition as a malady to be cured.
Gender-Transition Decisions Should Be Made by Families, Not the State
This month, the New York Times ran a two-part podcast series titled When Texas Went After Transgender Care, detailing that state’s effort to ban “elective procedures for gender transitioning, including reassignment surgeries that can cause sterilization, mastectomies, removals of otherwise healthy body parts, and administration of puberty-blocking drugs or
A Trans Pioneer Explains Her Resignation from the US Professional Association for Transgender Health
On her website, Berkeley-based clinical psychologist Erica Anderson describes her mission as helping those “who have embarked upon a gender journey.” She also seeks to advance the “shared goals of social justice and transgender well-being,” and offers assistance to anyone seeking to “understand, educate, and level up as a transgender
The Liar’s Club: Looking Back on Princeton
In 2017, I got the welcome news that I’d been admitted to Princeton University. At the time, I was ecstatic. And I remain humbly grateful for the education I received there. But now that I’ve graduated, I’m not sure the prize was worth the price I paid
Madness for Decivilization
For much of human history, people with mental illness were thought to be possessed by gods or devils. Madness, as it was called, was believed to be supernatural, not natural. Some Greeks, including Plato, viewed mental illness as a kind of spiritual gift, a portal into new ways of seeing.
The Creeping Orthodoxy of the Neurodiversity Movement
It is no longer fashionable to talk about autism spectrum disorders among certain quarters of the ASD community without reference to “neurodiversity.” As an individual on the autism spectrum myself, I was once firmly planted in the neurodiversity camp. However, over time, my enthusiasm for the movement has waned, even
The Victims’ Race
On August 2nd, 2013, 14-year-old Hannah Smith of Leicestershire, England, took her own life. She had been receiving cruel messages on the social networking site Ask.fm for months, and her parents concluded that cyberbullying was the main cause of her suicide. But then evidence emerged that the hatred Hannah
Time to Stop Using Suicide For Political Point-Scoring
The writer and influential feminist Chidera Eggerue caused outrage recently when she callously dismissed the problem of male suicide. In response to a question she had received from an audience member about why “some men have it so hard,” Eggerue wrote in a series of tweets that she didn’t
