Tag: mental health

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Escape, by Pat Gourley

Ah, escape, the act of breaking free. This word could well be one more synonym for “coming out”. This does seem to be a recurring theme, if one chooses to so interpret, for many of our Story Telling topics. It may be stretching a metaphor, something I seem at times to excel at, but I think we can view our LGBT Community Center here in Denver as an escape hatch and participation in this group for many as an accelerant. For me personally it has not been so much an accelerant as a re-fueling station. Story Telling has been a validation for me that what started in the mid-1970’s, thanks to the hard work and dedication of a small cadre of like-minded queer folk, was certainly worth the effort. I was not part of that initial group but did hitch my wagon to the Center in 1976.

Areas many of us LGBTQ folks have had experience trying to escape are the mental health issues we face in significantly greater proportions than the non-Queer community. Many of us have had very significant issues with depression, anxiety, addiction and suicide. The suicide rates remain, for LGBTQ youth in particular, disturbingly high even in this supposed age of post-liberation. The Trans community in particular is at grave risk for both suicide and murder.

Mental health issues among LBGTQ people are complex and in need of contextualization, intersectionality analysis and exploration with knowledgeable queer professional providers. It would be nice to see these issues addressed with the same depth and vigor that the sexual habits and health of gay men have been addressed in the last 40 plus years. Yes, certainly HIV was and remains a strong incentive to address how we fuck and the potential consequences of that but I must wonder about the very significant current and historical carnage from unaddressed mental health needs. These issues were prematurely thinning our numbers centuries before HIV came along and continue to this day.

A word of caution though in addressing depression in particular involves you and your provider not simply reaching for a pill or pills to address the problem. I am in no way saying that anti-depression medications do not serve a role and have been actual lifesavers for many. Do though proceed with caution, often easier said than done in our extremely fucked-up health care system so dominated by Big Pharma.

I read an interesting article in the NYT Sunday morning about how hard it is for many people to get off of antidepressants. They focused primarily on the difficulty some people had specifically getting off of Zoloft and Cymbalta. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/07/health/antidepressants-withdrawal-prozac-cymbalta.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

I’ve included a link to the article since I think it is important that the whole thing be read by anyone considering stopping their antidepressant or for that matter whether or to start one. This might be a great article to take to your mental health provider or primary care person if you think issues of depression are something that need to be addressed for you personally. It might piss them off a bit but they will get over it or you will hopefully find a new provider, though admittedly not an easy task in the current health care environment in this country.

Another piece I ran across in writing this was an article in The Guardian from May of last year by a fellow named Alexander Leon. He argues that we should be and I quote “ defiant in our acceptance of mental health problems in the same way we would about our sexuality or gender identity”.

A link to the piece: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/12/lgbt-mental-health-sexuality-gender-identity

Rather than describe our mental health issues as weakness, or perhaps a reason to seek out conversion therapy, a healthier and more spot on way to look at these issues is as “battle scars” to be addressed, a term used by Leon in the Guardian article. What is really remarkable is that so many of us have survived an at times unrelenting societal onslaught since an early age as a result of our budding identities. I am a firm believer that pharmaceuticals may sometimes play a role in addressing these battle scars but they should always be used in conjunction with strong Queer community support. So welcome one and all to SAGE Story Telling at the LGBT Community Center of Colorado and a grand escape from the often at times suffocating “hetero-normative” world we are born into.

© April 2018

About the Author

I was born in La Porte, Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

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Losing Touch, by Gillian

I will, before long, I expect; I’m rapidly losing other senses. My hearing is not too bad, but I don’t seem to smell the wet grass or the salty ocean with the strength I did as a child. Fresh strawberries and tomatoes right off the vine sure don’t taste as good as they once did, and my eyesight is battling the effects of glaucoma, so I have little reason to expect my sense of touch not to deteriorate. My mother had terribly inadequate blood circulation, leading to frequent complaints of not being able to feel her hands and feet, or feel with them. She would put me to work peeling potatoes, slicing bread, shelling peas or folding the linens, because, she said, she could not feel what her fingers might be up to. After she cut herself twice and then dropped our best kitchen knife on the stone kitchen floor where it broke, she was only allowed anywhere near a knife on really hot days – rare events in my pre-global-climate-change England. I don’t seem to have inherited that problem, but my Beautiful Betsy has exactly the same thing so before long I shall probably be called upon to perform all our household chores involving sharp utensils.

My dad lost touch. Sadly, it was not a problem with his fingers and toes but with his mind; his very being. Through dementia he lost touch with everyone and everything, including himself.

I first noticed some confusion on a visit home when he was in his early seventies – a little younger than I am now. I mentioned my concern to Mum but she shrugged it off with, well, Dear, I’m sure our minds aren’t quite as sharp as they once were. But she exhibited none of it, I noticed, and in fact she never did and was sharp as a tack till the day she died. I, of course, was living in Colorado and only saw them once a year or so, though out of necessity my visits became more frequent and of greater duration as they aged. The next time I returned, after this particular trip, I was aghast at my father’s mental deterioration. It was harrowing; heartbreaking.

He floated in and out, drifting from lesser to greater confusion and back again, all the time knowing he was losing touch. At one stage he held his wrist towards me, tapping at his watch – a much-valued possession. He gazed at it, then looked at me with tears and a look of such anguish in his eyes that I almost burst into tears myself, but of course I knew I must not.

‘I can’t remember,’ he faltered.

‘What is this? How do I make it work? What does it do?’

‘Oh .. um … nothing much …’

I ran my fingers gently over it. I had to put some cheer in my voice.

‘It sure is a beautiful thing, isn’t it? I tried, desperately.

‘It is,’ he agreed. And smiled.

Not many visits later I returned to see him safely settled into a memory care facility. By then it was easier on all of us. He no longer drifted in and out of differing cognitions. He had no idea who I was or who Mum was or who he was. He no longer struggled with what his watch was for.

He seemed remarkably at peace, so Mum and I were able to find peace for ourselves.

Right now, I am losing touch myself, though not, thank you God, in the way my dad did; at least not yet. Rather, I make a conscious effort to lose touch. I can only inhabit this current socio-political reality for a limited amount of time. I simply have to escape. If Agent Orange can inhabit a reality that is all of his own making, then surely, I can escape to my own alternate reality on occasion? I have a collection of home-made VCR tapes, mostly of ancient Brit sitcoms. Some of these shows are really pretty bad, but in my alternate reality the worse they are the better I enjoy them. So, most evenings I head for the basement TV, descending to my alternate reality as I say to Betsy. Though to be honest even bad Brit sitcoms reach a higher standard than this current American reality show in which we find ourselves, so in fact I am rising up to my alternate reality.

Margaret Atwood says –

‘You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see.’

Sorry, Margaret, I’m a fan of yours but I tried it and I didn’t like it. I reserve the right to lose touch.

© February 2018

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.

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Birthdays, by Betsy

The following is an imaginary voice from the Universe heard
inside a woman’s uterus by a viable life preparing for its day of birth.
“Now is the time for you to make your choice.  You may choose from these two options: gay or
straight.  In other terms—homosexual or
heterosexual.  Before you decide, let me
explain the consequences of your choice.
“If you select the gay option you will have many obstacles
in your life that you otherwise would not have. You will be considered abnormal
by many people from the start, you could very easily find yourself being
discriminated against by employers, landlords, merchants, and service
providers. The law may possibly not offer any recourse for you if and when you
are discovered depending on how the movement goes and the state of civil
rights.  You could actually be put in
jail if you are found out.
“You may feel constrained to stay in the closet for a long,
long time, maybe forever. That means denying your truth to yourself and to
others. This could have a serious impact on your emotional and mental health—possibly
on your physical health as well.
“If you try to express your sexuality and live as the
person you are; i.e. live as an openly gay person, you risk your safety,
security, and wellbeing. You will keep your self-esteem and self-respect
however. But there may be a price to pay for that.
“If you select the straight option life should be easier
for you.  You will derive benefits from
marrying a person of the opposite sex. As a woman, you will be safe if you serve
him well.  You will be secure if you do
his bidding.  You will have no difficult
choices to make because they will all be made for you and to your advantage if
you stay in line.  The only risk for you
is that you might screw up because you don’t realize that you have all the
advantages. 
“As I said, it’s your choice.”
The above scenario is, of course, absurd. None of this would
happen because this choice is not available to us. This choice is never given
to any of us before birth. We are born LGBTQ or heterosexual or gender fluid or
whatever else yet to be defined—whatever else exists on the sexuality
spectrum. 
The choice is made when we become aware, conscious, of
ourselves—our feelings, what drives us, with whom we fall in love. We make the choices
later in life when we understand that there IS a choice— and that choice, as we
all know, is not who we ARE by birth, but whether or not we choose to LIVE as
an expression of who we are.
Personally, I understand very well the consequences of
denying who I am and living as someone I am not. Once I became aware of my
sexual orientation I was able to make that choice, respect myself, and be happy
and fulfilled. 
Those who wish to change us LGBTQ’s, punish us, put us
away, or whatever, seem to imagine that we all experience the above in-utero
scenario and we should be punished or, at least, forced to change because we
made the wrong choice.  We made the
choice in-utero and were born gay yes on our first birthday, because we chose
to. REALLY!  Or, if they do not accept
that absurdity, they want to punish us for expressing our real selves—for
living as gay people.
I choose to live in a world which accepts every newborn
baby for exactly what it is—everything that it is.  I choose to welcome every life into this
world as perfect as I did one week ago my first great grandchild.
You know, I’m convinced he’s gay because of the way he
waved when he was born. Then when he started primping his bald head his mother
and grandmother and Auntie Gill were convinced too.  He’s lucky. He knows he is loved by us all—gay
or straight.
© 14 Nov 2016 
About the Author 
Betsy has been active in
the GLBT community including PFLAG, the Denver Women’s Chorus, OLOC (Old
Lesbians Organizing for Change), and the GLBT Community Center. She has been
retired from the human services field for 20 years. Since her retirement, her major
activities have included tennis, camping, traveling, teaching skiing as a
volunteer instructor with the National Sports Center for the Disabled, reading,
writing, and learning. Betsy came out as a lesbian after 25 years of marriage.
She has a close relationship with her three children and four grandchildren.
Betsy says her greatest and most meaningful enjoyment comes from sharing her
life with her partner of 30 years, Gillian Edwards.