And…”mental states” change all the time. Identities do as well, at times. Body image can change, but it usually takes time, as in the case of someone with anorexia nervosa.

Amanda

If they ever did come up with a way to alter the brain to fit the body then we’d be changing a person’s identity. Who are we to say what is a disorder and what is a valid part of someone’s individuality?

The line has to be drawn somewhere for what we can treat, and keep in mind that some people would draw that line a long time before the ‘treatment’ of homosexuality or even using such methodology to change people’s religious beliefs to match a national standard.

Nobody has the right to mess with what makes us who we are.

To be honest, even things that are CORRECTLY labelled as psychological disorders (e.g. Depression) carry the stigma of the ‘mental illness’ label, which is inevitably disproportionate to the ‘threat’ posed by the condition. Until this situation is corrected, I will resist the application of the term ‘mental illness’ to my condition.

I see two distinct camps here: one camp where they want BIID classified as a mental illness for whatever reason, and one camp where they want BIID not classified as a mental illness. As Sean has already pointed out, there isn’t enough evidence to determine either way which camp is ‘right’ as there’s not enough evidence to determine what BIID actually is.

This said, one has to question the validity of deciding without evidence that a condition is a mental illness. As the problem of GID being seen as a mental illness has shown, simply lumping BIID into the mental illness category without adequate reason will cause more problems in the long term than it would ever actually solve.

Do you have any convincing and irrefutable evidence that BIID is solely a neurological condition? I certainly don’t.

The fact is, there is some evidence that shows it is neurological, and there is some evidence that shows it is psychological. WE DON’T KNOW FOR SURE. That’s the bottom line.

We don’t know nearly enough to make such a sweeping, blanket, be-all-and-end-all statement. In various posts I’ve mentioned a few times a study being done on BIID by a neurologist/neuroscientist named Ramachandran. I have just recently read his book “A Brief Study of Human Consciousness.” In this book, he describes case studies of people with various kinds of odd, very rare body image disorders, and how they were treated. Many of them couldn’t be treated with psychology but could be treated neurologically. Many of them were treated with a combination of both. BIID isn’t mentioned in this book, but the disorders that Ramachandran did successfuly treat were similar enough to BIID that it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that BIID could be treated in a similar manner. The thing is, nobody has ever tried to treat BIID from a neurological point of view. Until they have, we can’t say “nothing works” because not everything has been tried.

That said, I do think that treatment protocols including surgery should be put into place as soon as possible to decrease the suffering of the currently transabled until science can catch up and offer the next generation of BIID suffers an effective remedy, at a young age, before it gets to the point of needing surgery.

And whether it is or isn’t a mental illness, I remain convinced that the *only* way we’ll see treatment protocols that really help us (such as possible surgery) is through the use of the mental illness label, at least while the condition gets accepted and known. Then later on it can get “readjusted” But that’s just me. ;)