How LGBTQ+ Discourse Can Relate To Children's Mental Health.

People who identify as LGBTQ+ had to fight to not be consistently put into a psychiatric ward. The history is filled with those who were not accepting of people who didn't conform to hetero-normative standards. LGBTQ+ people were seen as "other" and were thought to have something mentally wrong with them just because they felt and identified differently than those who identified as hetero-sexual.

Children and adolescents are affected by how they are treated especially if they are seen as "other" and are treated differently because of it. Children's mental health didn't become seriously thought about until a board in Chicago was alarmed by childhood delinquency. They wanted to study the IQ and brain functioning to determine the cause and and figure out how to fix it. Historically, mothers were seen as caregivers and if they weren't properly mothering their children, it was believed to have caused problems with children's brain functioning.

Researching children's mental health and how they need people to listen to them is reminiscent of the LGBTQ+ community had to deal with people not listening to them. In both instances, there's a group of people who are not being listened to or having their feelings taken seriously. Each movement started somewhere and it's interesting to see how far they came even if there's still more work to be done.