Psychiatrists, psychologists, and - come to think of it - the medical profession in general haven’t exactly distinguished themselves on the ethical front these last few years. Or the scientific front either. “A pill for every ill” is just getting completely out of hand at the moment, IMO. The idea that you can “prevent gender dysphoria”, whatever that even means, by interfering chemically with puberty seems debatable at best. The radical nature of the intervention is likely to have complex psychological effects in and of itself; it could even end up making the problem worse.
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“Prevent gender dysphoria” isn’t quite what I (or they) wrote, though. In any case I wasn’t taking a position on it myself, just pointing out that it may be hard to provide counselling to dysphoric kids that addresses depression, anxiety, etc without touching on their gender situation, given the current guidelines.
You can talk about anything without altering one’s chemistry.
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Well… you did. I quoted you. I appreciate you might not have meant it in the superficial sense of the drug therapy being a cure for “gender dysphoria”, but clearly some professionals do actually think of it that way.
I understand. And therein lies the problem. People are up against a medical establishment which is becoming increasingly less serious about its role in the world. They seem less and less interested in dealing with the problems as the present themselves, and more and more interested in shoehorning people into convenient diagnostic boxes so that they can follow some protocol that doesn’t even work. Procrustes would be proud of 'em.
What I wrote was “prevent gender dysphoria from causing mental health problems”, which is a different sentence.
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Fair enough, but I’m not sure that helps. The implication is that the gender dysphoria remains, which is itself a mental health problem. Quite how blocking puberty would prevent other associated problems - even in theory - is not entirely clear to me. A 17-year-old adult imprisoned in a child’s body is going to have a whole different set of problems, I suspect.
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This is true, and still a great reason to not used these drugs until fully tested. Just gonna have to keeping tucking that johnson.
You’re taking a position by commenting. You do this a lot.
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At least one of their (former?) members has written about how they have basically discredited themselves. I believe that was shared on one of these threads
Remember the replication crisis? The APA isn’t much of an authority on anything…
In a nutshell, most psychology research, when the same methodology is applied elsewhere, cannot be reproduced. The conclusions are basically worthless.
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I was just thinking about that. I think I posted it actually.
One reason for this is that there’s a whole lot of fraud going on (the other reason is pisspoor experimental design by people who should have never got a science degree in the first place). A relative of mine works in a research institution which is headed up by someone who was censured for a fairly egregious case of academic fraud - literally making up his results. It has not affected his career in the slightest.
Yeah, my first supervisor just made up at least some of her research. An interesting thing I learned was that for a lot of profs in my faculty, ethics was for other people. I don’t know how much that does or does not generalize
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The weaknesses in any research involving people are self-evident.
Some are better than others, but the idea that the APA knows shit about shit is a bit naive. It is a political organization
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It’s so easy to manipulate.
Yeah. Replication is a problem all over science, but I agree it’s particularly bad in areas like psychiatry. Drug studies are a little more controllable though, and that’s what I was suggesting as a minimum baseline for prescribing them in this situation.
My position is “there would be practical challenges in requiring psychiatric care for depression, anxiety etc in trans kids without blockers being prescribed, since psychiatrists are currently being told to prescribe blockers”. I’m not taking a position on whether that’s good or bad policy, because I don’t know enough about the psychiatry to have one. If forced to give an opinion, I’d probably say it’s bad, or at least that it there isn’t nearly enough gatekeeping around it.
Also, vaguely telling me that I do things a lot is something you do a lot.
Do I? I thought this was the first time.
Can we keep it vaguely related to the thread?