MHM Magazine

of mental illness and mental health. The popularising and psychoeducation has thankfully spread to a mixed and general population using many platforms including social media, allowing for information access to beyond the historical custodians of mental health/illness being clinicians. No doubt this has also resulted in unintended consequences including and specifically; misinformation of diagnostics, presentation and management of sometimes severe illness. The more positive, helpful and progressive unintended consequences include the move from referring to mental health and mental illness in a generalised, vague and unsophisticated manner. To this point, we can now focus on men’s mental or queer mental health amongst many others. The growing, though still narrow focus, on queer mental health is glaring and deeply concerning in its situating the queer community as deeply troubled by mental health difficulties and the growing numbers of said community’s presentation of mental health difficulties while receiving minimal clinical and social attention. Statistics contextualising the current, worrying situation do little justice and the lack thereof speak of a different injustice. It’s more common though in informed social conversations, clinical consults, or conferencing situations to be alerted and alarmed to this growing scourge – that of the mental health difficulties of the queer community and in the community. It’s essential to punctuate – albeit slightly embarrassing to still have to do so, that being queer is no longer classified (and should never have been) a pathology. While penning the falter sentence seems in itself offensive, perhaps like the ‘no-smoking’ sign on an airplane which only speaks to the most archaic of users, this too states what may be beyond obvious and is important too from the position of a developing history. Similarly, the suggested higher prevalence of difficulties in the queer community is also not an indictment of the community members at all, and rather perhaps of the control group and social statuesque. In fact, the above mentioned sentiments and pernicious propaganda have contributed to the pain and suffering of many individuals in the queer community, brutally so. From individual, family and social attitudes, to civil and human rights’ violation, rhetoric maligning queer communities, ostracising individuals who identify with queerness and depersonalising individual’s from the intrapsychic experiences seem to be the contributor and in some cases causes of distress for some within the queer community. It is also not difficult to entertain a debate that the expression of such hate, projections and shaming etcetera is itself the expression of some intrapsychic pathology hoping to unconsciously and unsuccessfully expel pathology and instead causing distress, deformation and tragically in some cases, death. Therefore, the inclusion of above historical prejudice here is for a few reasons. Firstly, as a bookmark to highlight and rewrite historical inaccuracies that identified queerness with illness, to emphasise and echo the antithesis. Secondly, the aim is to help identify how deeply destructive these inaccuracies have been, and similar to the global and generational corruption of eugenics, call attention, especially to researchers and clinicians to the power and deep potential pitfalls of population classifications. Lastly, and perhaps as a segue, it offers an explanation to many individuals and to the community about an overdue shift in stance though also help identify why exclusion is poisonous. Highlighting the variety and extent with which the queer community present with mild, moderate and severe mental health difficulties can be misused as above discussed. It can also be regressive and experienced as a pejorative analysis. While this may be an unavoidable unintended consequence, it’s important to state clearly that instead, recognising and identifying these difficulties may assist many individuals recognise for themselves and others, suffering and pathology in the community and know to seek management and treatment. Additionally, this may emphasise the dearth of knowledge within these unique strata of social sciences and personal lived experiences. Alluded to above is the inattention statistics offer, especially from a qualitative position, however it’s glaring that a discussion of mental health difficulties with the queer community would exhaust the categories and classifications in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 4 (DSM4). This is also not the intention here. Suffice perhaps to lift, possibly to annotate, a few common clinical presentations. The loaded relationship between queerness and substance use can also be found outside the scope of this article. However, substance, abuse, misuse, dependence and substance induced psychotic disorders are more than a common concern with high frequency presentations with many queer mental healthcare users. What is under appreciated is how often said individuals have lost the recreational use aspect of the substance and are unfortunately unaware most of the time of the self-medicating gain of substances. This unfortunately includes illicit or recreational and 2 | MENTAL HEALTH MATTERS | Issu3 2 | 2022 MHM