What If We Treated Every Mental Illness Like Gender Dysphoria?

The trans dilemma.

There are nearly 300 mental disorders listed in the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition), including gender dysphoria. However, to the best of my knowledge, we don’t treat any other mental disorder the way we treat gender dysphoria.

For example, if you dig into older books about psychology, you’ll sometimes find some very unique ways that therapists treated people. The story you are about to read is based on comments in “Time for a Change” from Richard Bandler, one of the co-founders of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. In the book, Bandler talks about working with a schizophrenic patient who insisted he was Jesus:

Richard Bandler tells one story about visiting a mental institution and dealing with a man who insisted he was Jesus Christ - not metaphorically, not in spirit, but in the flesh.

One day Bandler walked in to meet this man. “Are you Jesus?” he said.

“Yes, my son,” the man replied.

Bandler said, “I’ll be back in a minute.”

This left the man a little bit confused.

Within three or four minutes, Bandler came back, holding a measuring tape. Asking the man to hold out his arms, Bandler measured the length of his arms and his height from head to toe. After that, Bandler left. The man claiming to be Christ became a little concerned. A little while later, Bandler came back with a hammer, some large spiked nails, and a long set of boards.

He began to pound them together into the form of a cross.

The man asked, “What are you doing?”

As Richard put the last nails in the cross, he asked, “Are you Jesus?”

Again the man said, “Yes my son.”

Bandler said, “Then you know why I’m here.”

Suddenly you could see a wave of recognition sweep across the patient’s face. He stepped back and shouted: “No! No! I’m not Jesus. I’m not Jesus!”

As a side note, if you enjoy reading fun little stories about brilliant therapists trying slightly tilted therapy ideas on their patients and getting results, Tony Robbins and Milton Erickson have done some similarly wild things and gotten incredible results:

In any case, what you probably noticed in that story about Richard Bandler is that he may have pretended to be “Jesus-affirming,” but it was only to treat the man’s delusion. He didn’t just say, “Well, if you say you’re Jesus, then that’s good enough for me, Jesus! I guess you’re Jesus!,” which is essentially what liberals insist we do with trans patients. “If you say you feel like you’re the wrong gender, then you must be the wrong gender!” A human being can’t change sex any more than that schizophrenic patient could become Jesus. They’re both equally ridiculous delusions.

Think about how people with anorexia are treated. We don’t look at some poor girl with her ribs poking out and go, “You are so fat and disgusting! What a pig! However long you haven’t been eating, it isn’t enough!” We wouldn’t put some anorexic woman who could barely stand and is ten days away from starving to death on the cover of “Women’s Health” and call her, “The healthiest woman alive,” would we? Let’s hope not. Instead, we try to help people afflicted with anorexia to see their body as it really is, not “affirm” the funhouse mirror version in their heads.

With someone who’s depressed, we try to show them that we care, get them out of the house, and in some cases, give them drugs that will improve their mood. We don’t go, “I’d be depressed too if I were you. Why haven’t you killed yourself yet?” We’re not out here charging radio DJs that play, “Don’t worry, be happy” with a hate crime. We’re not telling parents of depressed children that unless they accept that their child is depressed for life, they’re going to be responsible for their child killing themselves.

If someone is so paranoid that they think everyone knocking at their door is there to murder them, we don’t encourage them to believe that. We’re not out there saying, “The postman? That Girl Scout? Your neighbor? The apartment manager? All of them want you dead and you have a civil right to defend yourself from them! Do whatever it takes! You’re under attack! No one could blame you for fighting back!” We don’t help those people see the world as some kind of “paranoid genocide.” “You’re trying to erase us!” No, we’re trying to help pull you out of the fantasy world you’re living in to show you reality.

Do we tell people with post-traumatic stress disorder, “That’s just how you are now and it would be wrong to change it?” If I become deluded and believe I’m Elon Musk, should that be enough for his banks? For Tesla? Can I take over Twitter? If I believe I’m Elon, why isn’t that enough? If you say that you’re a werewolf, a planet, a tree, or an anime character, should everyone have to treat you that way? If you deny someone is really a dragon, should you lose your job? Should corporations make people that believe they’re Napoleon into their corporate spokesmen? If a 50-year-old man identifies as a 13-year-old boy, should it be okay for him to date a 13-year-old girl? People seem to get this concept with other disorders, so why don’t they get it with gender dysphoria?

True story. Long, long ago, I was working for… well, the best way to describe it is a “quasi-governmental agency” that assigned radio frequencies. I had a man call in and very seriously tell me that the FBI was sending him messages over his fillings. He asked me if I knew anything about that kind of tech and said he’d tried to go into a building with thick cement walls to block the signal, but that nothing worked. Admittedly, I was highly entertained because talking to someone who had such a bizarre delusion, but also wasn’t in stabbing range, was fun for me. However, I didn’t humor him. I didn’t tell him, “If you think the FBI is sending you messages, then they are.” Instead, I was gentle and patient with him as I talked to him for half an hour about the implausibility of his theory while subtly suggesting he get some help.

The unfortunate reality is that a lot of people can be cruel about mental disorders, but me? I don’t see them as much different than physical disorders. People who are working on fixing their mental problems with a therapist should be treated with the same human decency, compassion, and sympathy that we give to people who need to see a doctor. If someone you know breaks their leg, you don’t go, “What a weak-legged b*tch you are for getting help!” The same goes for mental disorders. God bless the people who recognize something is wrong and are actually trying to do something about it.

However, because people that are mentally ill with gender dysphoria are being misled, exploited, and encouraged to embrace their disorder, it makes it difficult to treat them like other mentally ill people. They’re being told not to try to get better. This is harmful. They’re being told to mutilate themselves. This is harmful. Men are being allowed to share restrooms with females, play on their sports teams, and even go to women’s prisons. This is harmful. Everyone from activists to teachers, to corporations, to the government is promoting this mental illness non-stop to impressionable children who are being swept up in this social hysteria. These people are literally creating huge numbers of mentally ill people.

This is HARMFUL.

It puts sane, responsible people in an impossible position the same way if, let’s say, anorexia was being relentlessly promoted like this. Nobody wants to beat up on anorexics, but if we saw a massive increase in the number of anorexics after they were being celebrated on the Left and it was resulting in a large number of people destroying their bodies or committing suicide, what kind of person would you be if you didn’t stand up and tell the truth?

Yet, this is where we are with the trans community.

Telling them the truth and refusing to cater to their delusions is treated as cruelty. We have people screaming about protecting “trans kids,” as if there was any real way to do that other than treating them for their mental disorder and keeping them from becoming trans. Being trans is like strapping yourself into a suicide machine. How could it be any other way?

You’re living a lie. You’re mutilating yourself. You’re taking massive doses of mood-altering hormones that are more typical in the other sex and NO ONE really knows what the long-term ramifications of that will be. Then, when it’s all said and done, you’re still not going to be the other sex because it’s not possible and most people aren’t going to treat you like the other sex because it’s a lie.

Sadly, it has come to this, but we need to do everything possible to stop this sickness before it spreads any further. If that means we can’t be as kind and understanding as we’d like to be with people that have this mental disorder and are promoting it to the world, that’s unfortunately the way we need to go to keep more innocent people from being swept up into this madness.

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