At the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, are the lunatics running the asylum?

I worked at CAMH for a substantial period of time and they do some very good work there. But not always. When politics, and trendy theory interferes with medicine, the result is never good. At a point in the 1970's there was even a move to allow psychiatric patients to prescribe their own medication. You can guess how that turned out.

Now with transgenderism and the rather preposterous lemming-stampede to look progressive by trying to turn a psychiatric condition into an identity choice is going to work out badly for many people involved.

There are some wonderful transgendered people in the world. No transgendered person should be deprived of the rights that every other citizen enjoys, any more than a person with autism, or bipolar disorder should be deprived of theirs. 

But the fact remains that from a biological standpoint, surgery can't change a person from one sex to another. I'm more than happy to use female pronouns when referring to Caitlin Jenner as a matter of courtesy. But do I really, truly believe she is a woman? No. 

There are some people who really no need to live life in a different sex than they were born. It takes a lot of courage and determination to make that choice, and for those who do, or at least the good people who do, I wish them all the best. 

But children are in no position to understand the full ramifications of such a decision, nor are they fully able to assess themselves in that context. So when you hear about "transsexual children," and psychiatrists prescribing prepubescent kids hormone-blockers, you're seeing a form of child abuse by medical practitioners and these childrens' parents, many of whom clearly are manifesting a form of Munchausen Syndrome-by-proxy.

From The Globe and Mail:

After the controversial closing of its world-famous gender identity clinic, and the dismissal of Dr. Ken Zucker, its internationally renowned director, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health has acknowledged to The Globe and Mail that a damaging account of an alleged exchange between a patient and Dr. Zucker was false.

An external review that reported the details of the incident and led to the clinic’s closing has been pulled from the centre’s website.

In an update added Friday evening to the site, CAMH now says, “We have been advised that [the review] includes an erroneous statement. CAMH was recently made aware that an individual who participated in the review process had mistakenly attributed comments to Dr. Ken Zucker which were not made by him.”

The new paragraph concludes, “We regret that this statement was included in the report and apologize for the error.”

Earlier this week, an online story published by New York Magazine reported that a patient who provided a written submission to the two-member review panel had misidentified Dr. Zucker, the prominent, long-time head of the clinic. In the review, the patient, now a transgendered adult, was quoted anonymously suggesting that “Dr. Zucker had asked him to remove his shirt in front of other clinicians present, laughed when he complied, and then referred to him as a ‘hairy little vermin.’ ”...