When and how did you tell the family who you are?
Just reading this question, I feel again the anxiety, the sweating hands and the tachycardia of the moments that preceded the news that I would give them. I’m gay.
Thinking today, thirteen years of the “revelation”, the question would not be “do you know how much people in the LGBTQIA+ community suffer until they accept themselves”? Or the “how much do we still suffer, even after coming out?”
I ask this from a mental health point of view. Have you ever heard of minority stress theory? Who explains it is the psychiatrist and coordinator of the Transdisciplinary Ambulatory of Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation (AMTIGOS) at USP, Alexandre Saadeh.
Minorities in general, especially homosexuals or transgender people, because they are different, suffer prejudice and this is somehow internalized and this causes suffering of various types in the individual. So the fact of not feeling included, of feeling wrong, of feeling different, but a different one with a mistake, right? As if you were compromised for being homosexual, for being transsexual. And then this causes, over time, a stressful situation that can lead to depression, anxiety, drug abuse, self-mutilation, suicide attempts.
Alexandre Saadeh, psychiatrist and coordinator of the Transdisciplinary Outpatient Clinic for Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation (AMTIGOS) at IPq-USP
When we look more closely at the LGBTQIA+ community, suicide attempts can reach ten times – I said TEN TIMES more than the general population.
“AMTIGOS, a transdisciplinary outpatient clinic for gender identity and sexual orientation, has been in existence for 12 years. I have worked with the transgender population for over 25 years. Before, it was with the adult population and AMTIGOS was opened in 2010 to work with the adult population. But adults always said that it all started in childhood, but we didn’t see children or teenagers. Because of prejudice, this was a invisible population”, explains psychiatrist Alexandre.
only the invisible population have visible symptoms. Just pay attention. Today, AMTIGOS serves children and adolescents up to 15 years old in the laboratory, and has a waiting list of almost 200 families waiting for a first consultation.
“I remember my mother stopped the car, locked the doors and said, ‘I need to have a talk with you here now’. I said: ‘look mom, I don’t know what it’s like to be gay specifically, but now I like a boy in my class. She said things that were very heavy like ‘I’d rather die, I’d rather have cancer than you be this way. I’d rather be on a hospital gurney than you be like this”. Who counts is the singer, songwriter and dancer from Bahia dellima24 years old.
I started to get into this place of self-deprecation. I’ve had a few attempts to take my own life. Anxiety, at night, was always the worst moment for me, because when I went to sleep, everything went through my head and I just didn’t want to be there, because I didn’t feel loved, dear, wanted by the people around me and all this because of a condition that was simply who I was so, at that moment, I realized that maybe I was alone because of that, because of my sexuality, because of my way of being.
Dellima, non-binary queer artist
Who also felt the weight of coming out was the former military police officer from the Federal District, Henrique Harrison, of 30 years. Who doesn’t remember the photo of him kissing his husband on his graduation day from the corporation? According to Henrique, his psychological problems started there, as he claims to have been persecuted for his sexual orientation.
I started to lose sleep. I never had a problem sleeping, it always came and flipped. But I knew I was very tired. I worked all night, I came home and I couldn’t work, I couldn’t sleep either. With little knowledge of depression and anxiety, like most of the population, my husband was unable to support me at first. Until I understood what was happening, I thought it was a problem between us and it just snowballed.
Henrique Harrison, former military policeman
The lack of knowledge on the part of the family, due to prejudice or even because they think that depression and anxiety are seen as “freshness” makes the process even more painful. “So even my father used to say, ‘Oh, this is fresh. Can’t get through it. I think in my family they only really saw what was happening to me when I had a panic attack. I found myself trapped, I started to cry, I sat on the floor and lay down and said that I just wanted to work, that I just wanted to be happy.”, vented the ex-soldier.
Psychiatrist Alexandre Saadeh tells us the main symptoms that we need to be aware of:
Depression you will have a deep sadness, a loss of will, a lack of pleasure. What used to cheer you up on a daily basis doesn’t cheer you up anymore, you don’t see the color of things, everything gets too gray. You may lose your appetite or increase your appetite, lose sleep, sleep too much, you lose libido. The bonds, you don’t want to talk, you don’t want to participate in anything that has a lot of agitation, you withdraw and isolate yourself. Anxiety you have a feeling that something wrong, something very serious is going to happen. Sometimes you don’t even know what, but there’s that feeling of an expectation that something bad is happening. Your heart is racing, your breath is short and rapid. Your mouth is dry, you are pale, you are trembling. It’s a very bad, very bad feeling. So these are the main symptoms of the two paintings. Sometimes they happen together, then they border on unbearable
Alexandre Saadeh, psychiatrist and coordinator of the Transdisciplinary Outpatient Clinic for Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation (AMTIGOS) at IPq-USP
border the unbearable. It seems that this is the only way for us, as an LGBTQIA+ community, to awaken the eyes of those who are right next to us that there is a real problem to be addressed.
And luckily there is treatment and reception.
In São Paulo, in the last five years, those who are in a situation of vulnerability for being LGBTQIA+ can count on the help of the house 1. The place welcomes people of different orientations and gender identities. we talked to Iran Giusti, founder of Casa1.
In these five years of work, we understood that it was impossible for us to talk about reception, shelter and LGBTQIA+ struggle and survival, without looking at mental health, especially because of the focus we have. We have from the listening shift, which are punctual, emergency calls in a way to deal with issues that are more latent, to the continued psychotherapeutic follow-up and understanding the need, the psychiatric follow-up
Iran Giusti, founder of Casa1
In all these years, the support house has already served more than forty thousand people and has become one of the main cultural references for the LGBTQIA+ population.
Although psychological and psychiatric treatment is available in the public network, we know that we cannot find this follow-up, in proportion to the demand, in all regions of the country. São Paulo is still a reference in this type of treatment.
A pity, because problems that affect our mental health are not solved overnight, and need to be addressed with the same urgency as all other issues that go beyond our bodies.
We need years of treatment to deal with years of prejudice.
*Production: Letícia Brito
Source: CNN Brasil
