Thoughts on Miriam Grossman's "Unprotected"

Dr. Miram Grossman, M.D. has written a brave book. It is a cool, factual and damning indictment of the university student counselling profession including psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and other counsellors. It is passionate cri de coeur with footnotes to the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Grossman, a psychiatrist, worked for over a decade at a counselling center of a university and in this book she tells the stories of the students she met there. Some of her stories will break your heart.

She documents how political correctness is hurting the mental and physical health of university students. Instead of treating patients according to what is best for their health, they are treated according to a certain political ideology that views women as "just like men," STD's as something "everyone" gets at some point, and casual sex as detachable from emotions and therefore not dangerous to one's health. But Grossman points out several facts that are not being taking into account:

1. Delaying marriage and children until the late 30's is drastically reducing the chances of many of these women ever being able to have a family.

2. Women are not biologically designed for casual sex with no emotional committment and often suffer from depression, self-harm (eg. cutting) and low self-esteem as a result.

3. Sexual transmitted diseases are rampant on university campuses because of the hook-up culture and many of them will have long-lasting effects such as infertility and cervical cancer.

4. AIDS is the only infectious disease that is not treated seriously and aggressively by the State in terms of protecting those at risk and this is because of lobbying by homosexual activist groups, not because it is how doctors think it should be treated from a public health perspective.

5. Planned Parenthood and other abortion providing organizations provide almost no emotional/psychological after-care for clients because the politically correct line is that abortion does not cause grief or depression, just a sense of relief. Yet Post-Abortion Stress Syndrome is responsible for grief, depression and drug and alcohol abuse for those "invisible" women who suffer from it. As she points out, if this malady afflicts only 1% of women suffered from this malady, it would still mean that there are 400,000 women out there suffering and society officially pretending they do not exist!

Dr. Grossman is accusing the medical and counselling profession of putting the liberal ideology of the sexual revolution ahead of patient care and disease prevention. She is calling out institutions like Columbia University's "GoAskAlice.com" website on which students can get advice on matters of sexual health. It endorses risky behaviours such as sadism and masochism and swinging. And this is what in loco parentis has degnerated to at major universities today!

In this book, Dr. Grossman is professional and logical, never hysterical or even particularly judgmental. She is not asking universities to accept Jesus as Saviour and start preaching chastity (especially since she is Jewish herself!). All she is asking is the that public health, medical and counselling professions take their own standards and aspirations more seriously and stop letting a liberal, free-love ideology get in the way of providing factual information and psychological care to vulnerable people at a point in their lives when they are susceptible to being lured into self-destructive and dangerous behaviours. Is that really too much to ask of the helping professions?

Dr. Miriam Grossman, M.D. Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals how Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student (Sentinal Books, 2007).