Thread by @clare_bwell

When I first saw this I assumed the OP was a troll.. courting controversy for likes and follows.

I reflected during my swim this morning on some of the comments that the old psychiatrist made to me and now I'm not so sure..

There was the time I told him that I found it hard..

to come to appointments at the CMHT because it stirred up unpleasant memories of things I witnessed and experienced in hospital.

He told me he would consider discharging me "WHEN I got a husband." 🙄🤨

Or the time he decided to tell me about another of his patients in an..

alarming level of detail. The moral of the story being: "don't worry, even crazy women like you can find a man and have a kid. That'll sort you out."

I remember looking at the rainbow poster above his head and thinking about the woman who was waiting for me outside with coffee..

and a walk along the beach because she knew I found these appointments irritating and upsetting.

I didn't tell you about her though. I knew how a man who believed that heterosexual marriage was a universally positive experience for women could never understand. I knew how you..

might write about a woman like me. How I could be dismissed as "promiscuous or disinhibited", how my relationship could be determined "casual and dysfunctional" how my orientation could be taken as evidence of "an unstable sense of self" if it suited your narrative.

So I sat there in the threadbare chair in the basement of the CMHT, faking a polite smile but wondering about all the other people who had sat in this seat.. choking down ourselves, denying our love for fear it would be pathologised.

Homosexuality was removed as a mental...

disorder in 1976 but 'distress about one's sexual orientation' remained until 2013. 😳😳

I guess sometimes psychiatry's murky past casts a long shadow.

#MadTwitter #MHTwitter

*from the DSM