Local Paper: Gays Are Nuts

[Lucky]

The Desert Sun, a Gannett newspaper, serves the greater Palm Springs area, and today they have an innocent enough headline: Health Gaps Found Among LGBT.

Haha! Sure. Most of the gays have health insurance and rate their health as "good," "very good," or "excellent." This is followed by that world famous word: but. And in this case, the but is that we're nuts!

Yes, the second paragraph of this supposedly gay-friendly article says:

More than half of the LGBT participants had been diagnosed with one or more [emphasis added] mental health disorders, and about 40 percent had experienced some emotional, mental or behavioral problems that worried them in the past year, rates much higher than the general population...Forty-one percent had received a depression diagnosis, compared with 8 percent of the the general valley population. 36 percent with anxiety compared with 6 percent, and ten percent with panic disorder compared with 3 percent of the general public.

Gays interviewed blamed the disorders on the stress of being discriminated against. The Palm Springs area has a very large gay population, so if that kind of stress due to discrimination exists here, well what chance does a gay person have in say, Kansas?

It's a three page article, so I'll let you read it in its entirety, just don't panic or get depressed!

http://www.mydesert.com/article/20131004/LIFESTYLES03/310040023/Health-gaps-found-among-valley-s-LGBT

[RA1]

Personally, I think that the rest of the population just won't own up to having problems. Best regards, RA1

[Guest CharliePS]

I am not crazy, I tell you!!!

Since I was one of the persons surveyed, I was interested in the results. The stats don't surprise me, and I thought the explanations given for them made sense, although I thought a few more things might have been pointed out. Perhaps most germane is the fact that the overwhelming majority of the LGBTs surveyed were gay white men over fifty, so comparing them to stats for the "general population" is bound to produce some striking differences. For instance, recently reported surveys have shown that married men tend to be physically and mentally healthier than single/widowed/divorced men, yet at the time this survey was done, hardly any of the participants were married, or even could be married, which imposes its own stress. Surveys of racial minorities usually show higher stress levels than the general population, and gays have always suffered from similar social stresses. The incidence of HIV/AIDS is much higher in this group than in the general population, which leads to health problems, anxiety and depression unfamiliar to a middle-aged straight person in middle America. Age itself is often a factor in depression, and is intensified in a community which puts as high a premium on youth as the gay male world does.

The fact that Palm Springs is an ideal place for gay men to live NOW masks the history that most residents possess: years of living in much more repressive times and places before moving here, which leave their traces on an individual just as youthful drug, alcohol and tobacco use do. The latter activities, by the way, would probably have been found to be much more prevalent in in the gay community 30-60 years ago, when the gay community center was usually a smoky bar.

Finally, "mental disorders" covers a pretty wide field. The most common one, by far, found in this survey was "depression," which itself has many levels of intensity and duration, and can be a rational response to circumstances, unlike schizophrenia or extreme panic disorder. When the interviewer asked if I ever suffered from feelings of depression, I admitted that I did--I think I would be crazy not to experience depression from time to time, given the world I live in, where the idiots in DC closed down the govt. just as I was about to leave on a vacation tour of several national parks.

[Lucky]

I wonder what Lookin thinks about this. He's not nuts, but then he doesn't live in Palm Springs! Nice response, CharliePS.