Doubled Up With Stigma
Vaughan Meneses is General Manager of Outline NZ – a free, confidential telephone counselling service for the New Zealand’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) communities. He talks about homophobia, and how it affects the mental health and wellbeing of GLBT people, particularly those who already experience mental illness.
Transcript
VAUGHAN MENESES – GENERAL MANAGER – OUTLINE NZ
The problem, or some of the challenges, that are faced with being gay are actually not through being gay itself, but through the discrimination and the challenges that other people put upon us.
My name is Vaughan Meneses, and I’m the General Manager of Outline New Zealand, and we run an 0800 number which is 0800 OUTLINE.
The issues and the calls that we get now haven’t really changed in nature in the last twenty-five-odd years that I’ve been taking these kinds of calls. So even though as a society we might like to think that we are much more accepting and liberal than we were twenty years ago, the story’s not that much different.
We know from research that quite a significant number of people from within the gay community do suffer from quite a lot of depression; we have a high risk of alcohol and drug dependence; we have a high risk of suicide. Those are baseline mental health issues that confront a lot of us as individuals – disproportionately high for us as a community.
When you grow up in a sort of hetero-normative environment and you are gay, you don’t feel as if you have a sense of belonging or community.
When we come out, we actually have to learn a different language and different way of being, because we’re brought up to be heterosexual people essentially. We are not taught how to have our relationships with someone of the same gender, for instance, where the dynamic is different; we’re not role-modelled yet; we don’t have those images and those constants through our lives that actually let us know that it’s ok.
There’s a time, probably when we’re heading into our late thirties and forties, which is actually quite a high risk time, particularly for a lot of men. It’s a time when a lot of our peers, for instance, have moved into relationships and are drifting on, and we can sometimes sense that we have lost our youth. We have got ourselves maybe financially secure and then we look around and say ‘well what else is there’; and quite often that can be a really high risk time for us in terms of depression and suicide as well.
The older we get, the more invisible we become; we’re more prone to have issues around depression or other mental health issues that might come to the fore during that time.
Most of us as lesbian, gay, trans people don’t actually build up a whole family environment behind us – an extended family that come and actually support and nurture us into old age. What happens is we grow old with our peers. There are also a lot of challenges with aged care services at the moment; they’re real basic fundamental problems that we have in terms of our relationships being respected.
If you went to an aged care facility, for instance, and asked if you could move in there with your same-sex partner, there are a lot of challenges around that; and if those people already have a mental illness, then that just compounds that and makes it really, really hard.
What we’re finding now, and our calls are up eighty percent year on year this year, is that we’re doing a lot more counselling, and a lot of it is around those life-issues that people face around the isolation, around depression, around coming out, around relationships.
Mental illness is often invisible, and so it being gay, or being lesbian, or being trans; it’s not until you get to certain points of confidence that you can actually start sharing that you have a mental illness or that you might be gay or lesbian, or, heaven forbid if you’re a gay or lesbian that experiences mental illness.
The most important thing that you can do when someone comes out is actually let them know that you still love them and that you’re still there for them. Be there, and be involved. Ask about their partners, ask about their lives; find out what’s going on in their lives in the same way that you would have with any other friend or family member in terms of conversations.
And that is probably the single biggest thing that we can do in terms of our engagement with family and friends who are lesbian, gay, transgender, or with mental health issues, is actually engage them and validate that their experience is really important; and their lives are no less significant because of the new information that we’ve learned about them.
