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By Margie Nichols, Ph.D. Marriage equality laws continue to make change, but in the therapy world, people are still fighting Sexual Orientation Change Efforts. Also called ‘conversion therapy’ ‘reparative counseling’ or simply ‘ex-gay’ therapy, SOCE is considered unethical by all major professional counseling or therapy organizations worldwide. Yet in the United States, it is still practiced,…
By Margie Nichols, Ph. D. In a move that is causing consternation among psychiatrists, Thomas Insel, Director of the National Institutes of Mental Health, announced that NIMH will be ‘re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.’ Insel called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the Bible of psychiatry, nothing more than a dictionary at best. He…
By now most people have heard about John Gottman’s research comparing gay and straight couples, publicized a few years back. Gottman, a respected psychologist and researcher, did a study of gay relationships that revealed that for the most part same and mixed sex couples had similar similar levels of relationship satisfaction, similar problems, and coped with the…
by Margie Nichols, Ph.D. A couple of weeks ago, the Pink Therapy group in the UK made news by proclaiming ‘GSD’ – Gender and Sexual Diversities – as the new umbrella term for a community that seems to add letters by the season. Seriously, I’ve seen: LGBTQQIAA- lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, allies….
By Margie Nichols, Ph.D. Recently I saw a special report put out by the Gallup organization on the results of polling done last year. Gallup asked 120,000 people the following questions: ‘Do you, personally, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender?’ This is the largest number of Americans who have EVER been polled about their…
By Margie Nichols, Ph.D. Two things recently have made me think about that important piece of LGBT history, the ‘de-classification’ of homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973. The first is the news, released this week, that the fifth edition of the ‘Bible’ of psychiatric illness, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, will be published in Spring…
By Margie Nichols, Ph.D. Last week this was all over the Internet: a London transman named Maxwell Zachs began a petition to the World Health Organization to remove ‘transsexualism’ from its list of ‘mental disorders’ in the ICD, the international disease classification system. Zachs says: “There is nothing wrong with me. I am perfectly healthy….
Jordan Hunt, L.C.S.W., our guest blogger, is a psychotherapist who worked at IPG for many years until he moved to Connecticut this summer. A friend of mine recently asked me to comment on his blog where he was posing the questioning of why gay men have such a difficult time finding people to “date”. Below…
By Margie Nichols, Ph.D. Last night I watched ‘How to Survive a Plague’ home alone on my TV. A little context: HTSAP is a history of ACT-UP – The AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power- an activist organization that transformed the way the government responded to AIDS and forever changed drug treatment, drug trials, the FDA,…
By Margie Nichols, Ph.D. California just passed a law, SB 21172, making it illegal to practice ‘conversion therapy’ – the attempt to convert a homosexual to a heterosexual orientation – on minors. Few people understand the importance of this law, not only for gay teens, but also for all trans and gender nonconforming children, some…
