New Bent Freak: Antipsychotics Hasten Death Considerably…

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Fuck Off Racist Homos!

Right here, in the middle of so-called pewf friendly Sydney City, and something to which I  have referred to elsewhere on this blog, is that astonishing sense of entitlement that so many fags can not only be racist but that they can be explicit and proud about it. I have people that I, for some peculiar reason, call ‘friends,’ who boast that they would never do blacks or Asians or Arabs and who then would attribute specious stereotypes like ‘too girly, too queeny, small cocks, body odour, etc’ to those race categories. Only when the gay community can fess up to the extraordinary racism within its own ranks might such heinous behaviours and attitudes be successfully challenged. A status quo maintained, to some extent, by the complicity of the gay elite (yes, that does include the NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby), who remain silent or muffled on this fundamental human rights issue.

Anyway, think about taking this survey to increase our understanding (at least) of why some fags think it is okay to be racist…

Suicide Rate 1400% Higher in LGBTI Population

When a public servant, Catherine Branson, at the head of an Australian Federal Government department, the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (AHRC), releases a public statement to mark International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO), why I am not surprised that she characterises us fags, dykes and trannies as being intrinsically defective? To hold up that black-boxed lie that we are ‘14 times‘ more likely to attempt suicide is not only a grandiose concoction made in the absence of empirical evidence, it also lends itself to that nasty vibe that we are fully sick fuckers in desperate need of ‘special’ protection. And so, voila! The very same people who misrepresent us as forever close to the edge of madness if not death itself will happily oversee a vulnerability legal regime to protect us from, well, ‘them’.

Yup, it truly is a queer world…

Update: If you can cook up the fattest suicide statistics that you could possibly think of, and beat to a pulp anyone who would even dare to suggest that three times the risk is not 14 times the attempt, then ramping up the crap catcher to max, to squeeze in the newly discovered ‘suicide gene,’ barely seems like even a walk in the park. And so, scientists do seem to be getting closer and closer to working out what defective drivel along the DNA duck trail to nowhere is arcing out. Herein, their search could lead to discovering the duality of brokenness, that is, the cohabitation of psycho-suicidal-pathology and overt pewf tendencies. Are we possibly on the verge of, at once, eliminating suicide and pewfery,with just a dab hand and a very sharp scalpel…?

Gay Men Get More Cancer

Boehmer, U., Miao, X., & Ozonoff, A. (2011). Cancer survivorship and sexual orientation Cancer DOI: 10.1002/cncr.25950

I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but it does seem that there is something altogether flaky about being a fag. I mean, I spend most of my time on this blog nowadays batting off those who would claim that to think madness is to answer ‘gay’ and every second potential plunger off any old neighbourhood bridge tends to be immaculately groomed, powdered and preened. Still, rushing up to 50 as I am now am, it does little for my ego resilience to read, as in this article by Boehmer et al. (2011, n.pag.), that us pewfs are twice as likely to get cancer than our straight brothers. Is excitability, thus, a causative agent for metastasis? Probably.

The good news, if there can be any good news whenever one is talking about the big ‘C’, is that the survival rates for gay men afflicted by cancer are similar to those for straight men. A set of statistics that confounds me somewhat, since if we are twice as likely to ‘get’ what the fuck does it matter if we self-report that we just as likely to ‘survive’? I mean, Gloria Gaynor did not sing that gay anthem for nothing. As with other research on the health of gay men, HIV can cause a real clanger but was not properly accounted for here. Egad, it was not accounted for at all, other than for the authors (2011) to note that its presence can elevate the risk for some cancers, while diminishing the risk for others.

What will give much comfort to fag haters everywhere is the argument put forward by Boehmer et al. (2011) that ‘[t]he greater cancer prevalence among gay men may be caused by a higher rate of anal cancer’ and that said cancer is largely caused by the much loved practice of anal sex among gay men, a practice almost always conducted in the presence of the nefarious HPV. Even as I type this rubbish I can see Christians in my head, making a scary ‘if you get fucked up the arse’ video, ‘you are going to get cancer and die’. Not a pleasant thought for any gay man struggling with his sexuality while desiring to be penetrated with a passion.

I read something last night about men, in general, and how we are being reconfigured by big pharma to become a ‘high risk’ category regarding our dodgy lifestyle choices and reported higher rates, when compared to women, of morbidity and mortality. I should not stress the absurdity of the second part of that proposition, given that falling off the twig is a fate that awaits us all, regardless of our gender. The persistent and ever-increasing medical gaze on gay men in particular no doubt carries the promise of earlier detection, better treatment and enhanced outcomes for pewf-specific pathogens and yet, that little voice in my head says, ‘be concerned, be very concerned.’

Oh, and before swearing off buggery just remember that apparently one glass of wine a day sends your cancer risk through the roof…

Fag Hating Families Cause Much Distress

Diamond, G., Shilo, G., Jurgensen, E., D’Augelli, A., Samarova, V., & White, K. (2011). How Depressed and Suicidal Sexual Minority Adolescents Understand the Causes of Their Distress Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health, 15 (2), 130-151 DOI: 10.1080/19359705.2010.532668

In the contentious debate surrounding why us fags are as mad as hell, too much positivist logic thrusts all that madness back upon individual sufferers when, as we might have always suspected, the bulk of the maddening comes from the multiple traumas inflicted by harsh and unreasonable families, friends, peers and others. So much time and energy that is currently being wasted trying to pin down the pathological basis of homosexuality would, as Diamond et al. (2011) infer here, be better spent sorting out fucked-up families and the like for whom the assault of abandonment is executed with the doubly weird twist of acting as though they, the perpetrators, are actually the ‘most’ aggrieved. You know, how when families ‘discover’ that their little Johnny or Mary is as bent as a reed in a gust and thereafter they need continual affirmation of the struggle into which they have been plunged. Me thinks that instead of getting distressed, planning suicide or doing drag under duress, young fags everywhere should revolt against their family as my cat does whenever she gets stressed. That is, she just vomits.

Some homage is due here, no doubt, for Laing, Esterson and Szasz, who among other brilliant minds told us all those years ago that madness really does ‘run’ in families…

Mental Health Services Do Not Prevent Suicide

Johannessen HA, Dieserud G, Claussen B, & Zahl PH (2011). Changes in mental health services and suicide mortality in Norway: an ecological study. BMC health services research, 11 PMID: 21443801

‘Suicide is a complex behavioural phenomenon in which cultural, social and psychological aspects play important roles. Thus, suicide cannot be reduced to a disease. Still, it is well documented that several mental disorders increase the likelihood of suicide. For example, statistics from Norway reveal that approximately 15% of all who commit suicide were in specialist mental health treatment for a psychiatric disorder at the time of death’ (Johannessen, et al.  2011, n.pag.).

Whenever the suicide rate drops, for example, as referred to in this article (2011) regarding Norway, by some 26% over the period 1990-2006, the suicide prevention industry is quick to put up its collective hand and scream ‘success’ for any intervention that it might have instituted. However, when you dig a little deeper, you typically find that simplistic cause effect conclusions, almost always made with little or no ascription to any ‘hard’ evidence, fade into absurdity (2011). That the autumn sky is sparkling blue today is not because I wished it so, last night.

Something peculiar about the suicide prevention industry, and something to which the authors (2011) here refer, is that suicide prevention is rigidly constructed within a biomedical paradigm that privileges hospitalisation as paramount in ‘safeguarding suicidal individuals’ (2011). The fact is that such hospitalisation, particularly when it relies heavily if not exclusively on psychotropic medication as the prescribed treatment modality, tends to aggravate rather than alleviate the reality of later, completed suicides (2011).

The argument hinted at by Johannessen et al. (2011), and one which is supported robustly by critics of the biomedical paradigm, from Thomas Szasz to David Pilgrim, is fundamentally that the complexity of the human condition cannot so easily be reduced to one or more discrete, chemical interventions. Suicide is indeed ‘a multi-factorial phenomenon’ (2011) and any attempt to squeeze it into a designated box is contrary to addressing the underlying causative factors that might ultimately compel someone to take her or his own life.

Thereby, the failed strategy that conceptualises suicide ‘as a symptom of mental illness’ (2011) in need of treatment is rejected by the authors (2011) in favour of an approach that emphasises treating the actual ‘suicidality’ (2011)…

‘An alternative strategy has been proposed, namely, a focus on suicidality as the primary clinical target, in which suicidal behaviour and its causes are addressed directly. In this approach, the individual is seen as primarily suicidal with various sub-symptoms of mental illness in need of treatment (2011)’.

What a total cop out!

Just as it seemed to me that Johannessen et al. (2011) were starting to develop a strong rejoinder to the folly of responding to suicidal ideation on a purely clinical basis, they back step to confirm that however you might describe it, suicidal ideation requires a predominantly clinical response. Therein, while at once conceding that substantial expenditure increases by the Norwegian government on traditional mental health services have had null impact on the overall suicide rate in that country (2011), the authors (2011) are content to support a barely modified form of the status quo ante, as progress.

I note here that the suicide rate for men in Norway is nearly three times higher than what it is for women…

Taking (Another) Break From the Struggle

A little over a month ago, I started the painful push toward moving house from one arc of the city to another. Somehow, amidst all that, persistent bullying to which I am being subjected to at work, coupled with a lingering and intensely traumatic event that precipitated that bullying, had left me feeling lower than low. For moments there, I contemplated suicide, not as a wilful intention to die but as an unconventional form of stress relief (see Corrigan, Fisher and Nutt, 2011 for more on that interesting phenomenon). For the first time in many years, I found myself sitting across from a counsellor, joining dots between the cognition and emotions that for me, had gotten so seriously out of whack. Herein, being a man makes retelling the details of that traumatic event that occurred in the middle of 2010 extremely difficult, in that to anyone outside of trauma world, said event would seem impossibly mundane.

We do much harm to men, I think, to whom we refuse to give the benefit of actually listening to their stories and sharing, if not also trying to understand their suffering…