Islamophobia and Ethical Challenges for LGBT Mental Healthcare

Abstract

There are multiple obstacles that seem to prevent lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) people who also connect in some way to the Muslim community from readily receiving competent psychiatric care. These include the legacy of the history of psychiatry in pathologizing LGBT identity, increasing Islamophobia, and very limited numbers of similarly matched clinicians. The LGBT who identify as Muslim can experience being unwelcome in the LGBT mainstream due to Islamophobia and being unwelcome in the Muslim community due to the Islamic beliefs about homosexuality. That can also lead to an individual feeling that they need to choose one of the other of those identities. If the stigma of presumed mental illness is added, then the potential patient may feel triply stigmatized. To complicate matters further, the microtrauma and major traumas this subgroup experiences in society seem to correlate with an increased prevalence of various psychiatric disorders. When needing psychiatric care, individuals experiencing that social rejection can show initial mistrust in medical systems. That mistrust needs to be countered with an outreach of welcome, supplemented with culturally competent caregivers on-site or via referral. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)