One Bad Apple

We have been getting a bum rap from Dr. McHugh since the nineteen-seventies and at 88 he is still attacking us.

Standing Against Psychiatry’s Crazes
In 1979 Dr. Paul McHugh closed the sex-change clinic at Johns Hopkins. In the ’80s he testified against phony ‘recovered memories.’ He hasn’t given up the fight.
The Wall Street Journal
By Abigail Shrier
May 3, 2019

You might have heard this joke: A man in a car gets a call from his wife. "Honey, be careful," she says. "A car is going the wrong way on the highway." He replies: "It’s not just one car. It’s hundreds of them!"

If it were a psychiatrist joke, Paul McHugh, 87, could be that driver. A professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a tenacious skeptic of the crazes that periodically overtake his specialty, Dr. McHugh has often served as psychiatry’s most outspoken critic. Either he’s crazy, or all the other psychiatrists are.

The best-known, and most controversial, decision of his professional life is newly relevant—and recently reversed. In 1979, as psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, he shut down the Gender Identity Clinic, which performed sex-change operations. In his view, the hospital had "wasted scientific and technical resources and damaged our professional credibility by collaborating with madness rather than trying to study, cure, and ultimately prevent it," as he wrote in 2004. In 2017 the clinic was reopened as the Center for Transgender Health, performing what it now calls "gender-affirming surgeries." Its medical-office coordinator, Mellissa Noyes, told me "the demand is massive."

Like a bad penny he won’t go away and I think that we will still be hounded by him even when he is pushing up daisies.

He even thinks that soldiers coming back from war are faking PTSD…

Dr. McHugh argues that the treatment of returning soldiers for the liberally applied PTSD diagnosis is another example of iatrogenesis [a Greek word meaning "brought on by the healer"]. Such diagnoses are far rarer among Israel Defense Forces veterans, who experience plenty of trauma. Israelis "know that you can get a terrible psychological reaction out of a traumatic battle. And they do take the soldiers out, and they tell them the following: ‘This is perfectly normal; you need to be out of battle for a while. Don’t think that this is a disease that’s going to hurt you, this is like grief. You’re going to get over it, it’s normal. And within a few weeks, after a little rest, we’re going to put you back with your comrades and you’re going to go back to work.’ And they all do."

It is a case of 60,000 psychiatrist are wrong and he is right… talk about being egotistic.

In fact, both parties seem to be sleeping fine—separately. Most current Johns Hopkins medical students, Dr. McHugh says, won’t talk to him. "They think that my views must be motivated by hatred," he says, sounding baffled.

I think his views are shaped by his religion, he is a practicing Catholic and has strong conservative views and I don’t think that it is based on hate but I think his religion is biasing his views on LGBTQ+ people. Earlier in the year he has a book out that is a review of published research on gender dysphoria.

Dr. McHugh is going to be with us for a very, very long time as long as haters are out there against us.

Note: this article is behind a paywall. But it seems like it has been cross posted here.