Diversity Rules Magazine

3 Diversity Rules Magazine April 2016 David-Elijah Nahmod is a film critic and re- porter in San Francis- co. His articles appear regularly in The Bay Area Reporter and SF Weekly. You can also find him on Facebook and Twitter. David developed Post Traumatic Syndrome Disor- der (PTSD) after surviving gay conversion therapy as a child and has found that many in the LGBT community suffer from severe, often untreated emotional disorders due to the extreme anti-gay traumas they endured. This column chronicles his journey. For about a year or two I've been dealing with memory loss issues. I've been late with press deadlines. I'd forget to be ready for interview appointments. "We already talked about that yesterday." my closest friend would tell me. "Don't you remember?" "No, I don't," was my reply. It was getting out of hand. I knew I had a serious prob- lem when a few of my editors told me that I needed to be more mindful of deadlines and that my constant tardiness had become an issue. My first thought was chilling: was I in the early stages of Alzheimer's Disease? I had recently sixty years old, a little on the young side for Alzheimer's, but certainly in the age bracket where this was a possibility. Fortu- nately, thanks to the Affordable Care Act (Bless your heart, President Obama) I now have the best health coverage I've ever had, and so I went to see a neurolo- gist. Alzheimer's was ruled out at the first meeting. e doctor asked me if I ever forgot my address, names of my friends, or how to get from one place to the other. "No to all of the above," I told her. She began to ask me a lot of questions about my physical and mental health history, and of course my PTSD diagnosis came up. e doctor asked me many questions about my PTSD symptoms and what caused it to develop. As I recounted in the very first edition of this column, my PTSD was originally caused by my having been subjected to gay conversion therapy during childhood. My parents, horrified that I might not be straight, had me committed when I was 8 years old. While in the hospital I was given drugs--like orazine--which are now banned from use in children. My "doctor", who wore a Yarmulkah at all times, quoted the Torah (the Hebrew version of the Old Testament) to me during "therapy". is was the beginning of many years of re- ligious mental abuse in which I was regularly assured about how "sick" I was--the abuse continued until I moved out of my parents home at age 19. It never fully stopped until I cut them out of my life when I was thirty. When I was around 15 I had an allergic reaction to one of the drugs I was given--I was left temporarily blinded. e result of this horrific childhood was a forty year battle against the psychotic episodes which PTSD can cause. My symptoms, which had been dormant for a few years, came roaring back when, in between 2008- 2010, a series of gay and lesbian bloggers inflamed anti-gay and anti-Semitic hate against me for nothing more than a cheap laugh. As I recounted in Times of Israel, gay activists laughed when I needed police in- tervention and was left in a suicidal state as a result of their behavior. As recently as 2014, which was four years after the police intervened on my behalf, gay ac- tivists continued to forward their own inflammatory lies to my editors, hoping to take my livelihood away from me--I was told that I'm an "anti-gay bigot" for not supporting such abominable conduct. Concurrent with that horror, I was forced to endure a five year campaign of bullying and slander at the hands of a psychotic fan of the classic TV series Dark PTSD Memoir - Con't on page 19 If You Could Read My Mind The Shock of My Life By David-Elijah Nahmod

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