PRESS STATEMENT: MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONALS CRITICISE UNION HEALTH MINISTER’S STATEMENT ON HOMOSEXUALITY
6 July 2011: We are a group of highly qualified mental health professionals who are practicing as psychiatrists, clinical psychologists and behavioural psychologists from across the country. We regret the statement made by Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad on Monday where he called homosexuality a “disease”, as being “unnatural”, and a having “come from western shores”. Scientific evidence shows that homosexuality is a natural variant of human sexuality and is not a mental disorder or disease. Homosexuality as a specific diagnostic category was removed from the World Health Organisation’s ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders published in 1992, and from the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-IV Guidelines in 1973.
In the course of our professional lives, have interacted with hundreds of Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender across the country, and it is a complete misconception that homosexuality is “western”. We believe that the Delhi High Court’s 2009 judgment decriminalizing homosexuality removed a major source of stigma and discrimination faced by LGBT persons in India and was rooted in a concrete understanding of the mental and psychological harm that section 377 inflicts on LGBT persons.
The unscientific claims made by the Union Health Minister, if left unchallenged, will lead to irreparable harm to LGBT persons. We call upon Mr. Azad to retract his statement immediately.
1. Dr. K.S. Jacob, Head, Department of Psychiatry, Christian Medical College, Vellore
2. Dr. Vikram Patel, Sangath, Goa
3. Dr. Soumitra Pathare, psychiatrist, Pune
4. Dr. A.K. Kala, Clinical Director, North India Psychiatry Centre, Ludhiana
5. Dr. Debashis Chatterjee, Founder Ishwar Sankalpa and Member Indian Psychiatric Society, Kolkata
6. Dr.Kaustubh Joag, psychiatrist, Pune and Associate Member, Indian Psychiatry Society
7. Dr. Subir Kumar Hajra Chaudhuri, Institute of Psychiatry, Kolkata
8. Dr. Pratap Kumar Rath, psychiatrist, Bhubaneswar
9. Sarbani Das Roy, Honorary Secretary, Ishwar Sankalpa, Kolkata
10. Jolly Laha, pschotherapist, Kolkata
11. Ratnaboli Ray, Co-founder National Alliance of Access to Justice for people with Mental Illness (NAJMI) and Founder, Managing Trustee, Anjali Mental Health Rights Organization
12. Radhika Chandiramani, clinical psychologist, Delhi
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
Hi Gautam..It is pathetic that our union health minister can get away with passing such statements. The damage done is done..there are parents trying hard to understand homosexuality and accept their gay or lesbian child as they are and then comes a statement like this from a authority figure…..a retraction can only help a bit…
LikeLike
It is indeed sad to see people at the helm of affairs who many in our country follow and listen to day in and day out making such ridiculous scathing foolishly ignorant statements. Why can’t we behave normally? It’s time we started abstaining from making a brouhaha every time someone says LGBT.
Disgraceful on the part of the minister, to say the least.
LikeLike
When so-called advanced nations (Netherland, Britain) can begin to take stand against ‘liberal’ idea of multiculturalism out of practical difficulty (integration of society getting difficult to practice) [http://www.hudson-ny.org/2219/netherlands-abandons-multiculturalism], imagine the degree of sub-stratification, addition of 3 tiers (of sexuality) to existing differences of class, caste etc is going to cause.
In America less than half women between the age of 25 to 40 have one child or more. Japan experienced this a decade back. Indians keep talking about diminishing sex ratio of females; hopefully, men would soon cease to be affected by this!
Just as the developed nations, today, can demand regulated effort towards integration from immigrating minorities, keeping a check on their religious practices, they shall at a certain point in time, definitely require individual sexuality to further ‘integration’ of main-stream.
Being ‘normal’ (rabindrasubhash perhps indicates non-mainstream sexuality by this) one day might seem abnormal the next. Who knows what the minister says today becomes a scientific finding in a few years; a political theory and policy next.
LikeLike
In Reply to What Trayansh has said:
Hey Trayansh! Hope all is well at your end.
By “Why can’t we behave normally”, what I meant was there’s no need to create a fuss over the issue (if there is any!) every time we hear LGBT. When doctors, psychiatrists, and researchers across the globe have endorsed the idea of “sexual orientation”, what stops us from not doing our work and unnecessarily making a huge hue and cry over an “absolute nothing”. It saddens me to see people even debating these things. Things like these lead me into believing we are not a mature society as of now and we all (at least I do) understand that. But, it’s a continuous process of evolution and we should be accommodating. And you know something, even this treatment of “accommodation” is wrong on our part because there is nothing extraordinary about a person having a different orientation than ours because a sexual orientation is a sexual orientation. There is nothing mainstream or non-mainstream about it.
And why should we need to look west. We are well grown up intellectuals with access to almost the same amount of information that our western counterparts do.
And what was terribly scathing in the minister’s remark was the word “disease”. How on earth could anyone (you, I, anyone) endorse that or even associate the word with a possibility in future. It’s nothing but disgusting.
Being MATURE at heart and soul is the need of the hour.
Thanks for the comment, anyway.
LikeLike