Personal and professional prejudice – awareness and consequences (Reading)

The main objective of mental health care providers is to build rapport with the people who seek their professional help and establish a relationship of trust in order to provide meaningful and long-term support.

People who reach out for psychosocial services might have already experienced stigmatization, discrimination, and/or exclusion by other health care professionals or institutions, which makes it even more important to counteract these previous harmful life experiences by showing acceptance, tolerance and providing safe space for LGBTQI+ clients.

Clients will sense if the psychologist, social worker or hotline operator has a prejudice against them and this will lead to numerous painful and distressing consequences, such as

• Accepting the prejudice as a truth, which might lead to severe psychological damage; or
• Refusing to accept it but feeling betrayed by one more potential figure of support.

Prejudice and implicit bias

The word prejudice means a preformed negative, unreasonable stereotype towards a group of people.

Prejudice can often be

• Suppressed (“I know I have a prejudice towards LGBTQI people but will not show it because I am aware it is not accepted.”); and
• Rationalized (“Gay people are mentally sick, and I know this because I have heard it many times. That’s the way it is.”)

Implicit bias is difficult to detect since we are not aware of it. To gain awareness of it, it is important to

• Accept one’s personal and professional obligation to study one’s own bias in order to effectively provide psychological and emotional support to LGBTQI+ clients;
• Keep in mind that once we become aware of our bias, we might instinctively deny it, and it takes courage to try to transform our personal and interpersonal beliefs;
• Understand the messages we received and the heteronormative social norms around us to help us identify our own beliefs and biases that we can then challenge, helping to make us stronger allies.

Once aware of our own bias, we could try to implement the following techniques to transform it:

• Individuation, i.e., the process of focusing on specific information about the person, and avoiding their categorisation based on stereotypes around various elements of their identity by asking ourselves questions such as
  • “How can I set my assumptions aside in order to get to know the person who is seeking help?”
  • “Do I only perceive the person as trans without taking into consideration all other aspects of their personal history, development, experiences, relationships?”
• Perspective taking, i.e., the process of putting ourselves in the shoes of the person seeking support by asking ourselves questions such as
  • “If I was gay, how would I feel in this moment, meeting this new mental health practitioner? What would I be worried about? What would be my thoughts?”
    

    Important note If even after realising your own implicit bias towards LGBTQI+ people you still cannot overcome it, following the ethical principles and standards of care you should refer clients to a colleague who provides LGBTQI+-affirming care. Professionals who strongly believe that diverse sexuality/gender identity is a mental disorder, an illness, caused by past trauma or dysfunctional family structures and relationships, infectious, a sin and still provide services for LGBTQI+ people in order to “treat” them, do not only violate professional and administrative principles, guidelines and standards of care, but most importantly they harm and damage a person’s mental and physical health, social standing, personal relationships, and overall quality of life.