Positioning Identities: Lesbians' and Gays' Experiences with Mental Health Care

How do lesbians and gays negotiate their sexual identities in mental health care contexts? How do they manage the institutional homophobia and heterosexism embedded in health care practice and practitioners? Using interpretive phenomenology, Hazel Platzer overturns limiting dualisms to describe the ways in which lesbians and gays are silenced and pathologized in their mental health care encounters, how they resist, and how their resistance can restrict access to care. She highlights the difficulties of researching a sensitive topic with a relatively “hidden” population, and devises innovative techniques for handling bias and a multi-methods approach to the phenomenological study of experience and identities. She then offers proactive steps toward creating a health care environment in which lesbian and gay identities are normalized, improving both access to and quality of health care.