Is Lesbianism A Sickness - Essay Example

Calling something a “mental illness” has, ever since psychology became a respectable science, has constituted an effective tool for smearing individual human beings with the label of “deviant” or “abnormal”. These “diagnoses” have, instead of promoting individual health and well-being, reinforced society’s biases and promoted oppression. Unfortunately, these kinds of attitudes and folk psychological notions of “mental illness” still remain, which leads some people (particularly lesbians) to remain safely in the closet.

However, doing so poses a great risk to the psychology of the lesbian in question. Nevertheless, as Nanette Gartrell1 points out, “coming out of the closet” is the only way to resolve many of the problem that afflict lesbians who feel that silence is necessary for their jobs, homes, economic security, families, friends, or their children. Gartrell surveys the history of lesbianism by looking at its history of psychological evaluation. Like male homosexuality, it was treated as an “illness” or as a matter of abnormal psychology.

While it is clear today that there is no physical basis for such a scientific conclusion, in previous times the science was made to reflect a value-based conclusion instead of a factual one. Freud, like in many of his examinations, created an elaborate explanation for lesbianism, using a series of his concepts. Likewise, Helene Deutsch explained lesbianism by looking at the phenomenon as a “perversion”, which is a patently anti-scientific inference. Criticism of this psychological methodology led to advances in the study of lesbianism from a psychological perspective, and thus a better understanding of the phenomenon itself.

No longer were lesbians categorically seen as “perverse” by researchers: indifferent investigations could pursue the truth about the place of lesbians relative to heterosexual women in the