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(This story was first published in 2021. It has been republished from the FIT archives to mark the fourth anniversary of the reading down of Section 377 of the IPC.)
Therapy can save lives, but Mental health practitioners, can sometimes do more harm than good when it comes to the wellbeing of queer people.
"I hope no other person has to go through something like this," says Reyansh Naarang, a non-binary queer rights activist, while recalling his experience with mental health practitioners in the past.
What happens when the system that is in place to heal, to support and help you grow, turns into an ordeal that threatens your wellbeing?
From invalidation, and humiliation, to the threat of outing, and in extreme cases, abusive conversion therapy, mental health practitioners, in many cases, do more harm to people of the queer community than good.
LGBTQIA+ activist and therapists speak to FIT about why mental health support for queer people can only begin with queer affirmative therapy.
On May 2020, Anjana Hareesh, a 21 Year old bisexual woman, died by alleged suicide.
In her last live video, Anjana recounts the physical and mental abuse her family inflicted on her with the help of doctors at mental health facilities.
But, unfortunately, Anjana's experience is not a unique one.
Speaking of the kind of abuse that queer people are often put through by medical practitioners, queer rights activist, Ankit Bhuptani says,
"I know cases wherein a child has been put under lock-in their own home. They live like a prisoner within their own home," he adds.
"Most clients come expecting therapy to be safe because therapy is supposed to be a safe space. The question is not what kind of harm can we do. It is, what harm have we not already done?" asks Ipsa James, a freelance queer affirmative psychotherapist based in Delhi.
"Just looking at the history of psychology is enough to tell us about the harm that has been done towards queer people and other minorities," she adds.
"And this is not something that they say to your face. This is something they make sure you're aware of. Because they know that the parent has brought the child there," they add.
Reyansh goes on to say, "as a queer person, a closeted queer person, you would go to a therapist and your first instinct would be to find out if that person is queer affirmative or not, whether they will invalidate my experiences or not."
Pooja Nair, another queer affirmative therapist explains this further.
"Largely, a lot of people are getting out of educational institutes learning or knowing more about how to cure queer people rather than how to support queer people."
She speaks of licenced medical professionals that continue to peddle, often abusive and violent, 'corrective' treatments like conversion therapy.
"There are costs and consequences of being queer in a cis-heterosexual world," she adds.
"That's when you also need, we're affirmative mental health care, in order to support yourself as a queer and trans person in a sort of hostile difficult unsupportive world," says Pooja.
Rishi Talwar, another queer affirmative therapist, speaks of the Meyer's minority stress model.
In such cases, he adds, the stress tends to compound, "because you're dealing with the same stresses that cis-heterosexual people are dealing with, but there is an additional layer of stress of dealing with your identity, yoursocial norms, friends, family and navigating these."
"I think most of the places that I worked at had regressive views. As a queer person, even I had been on the receiving end of those," she adds.
"What stuck with me was them not standing up against 377, not empowering queer patients, that they weren't calling out other therapists for things like conversion therapy," Ipsa says, speaking what led her to affirm herself in her practice.
For the queer affirmative therapist, the first step is always to acknowledge that one's own training has not equipped oneself to work with the queer and trans communities.
That we may have passed out of Institutes where the curriculum was pathologizing and medicalizing queer identities and did not really give us enough to support queer and trans people in their journeys.
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Published: 30 Jun 2021,01:21 PM IST