Unravelling

The second episode of Unravelling’s Pride Month series examines the hidden human and economic costs of so-called conversion therapy. Kurt speaks with health economist and professor Ben Harrell, Ph.D., of Trinity University, on how these discredited practices shape not only mental health outcomes but also education, employment, and long-term financial well-being by disrupting what economists call human capital.
Dr. Harrell highlights elevated risks of depression, anxiety, suicidality, and family disruption among those subjected to conversion efforts, with particularly severe impacts on transgender and gender-expansive people. He also reviews research on state bans, including evidence that protections are associated with reduced suicidal ideation among high school students.
Grounding the data in lived experience, the episode reflects on young people navigating non-affirming religious environments and the long process of reclaiming identity. Dr. Harrell offers compassionate guidance for families and youth, emphasizing affirmation, dignity, and the importance of safe spaces that honor both faith and identity.

Links -
Ben Harrell, Ph.D. 
Dr. Harrell's Google Scholar Page

What is Unravelling?

How can a deeper understanding of mental health help us see our world, and ourselves, differently? Hosted by therapist Kurt White and journalist Mary Wilson, each episode of Unravelling explores a complex mental health topic with insights from both professionals and people with lived experience. Whether you're trying to make sense of the world or just the slice of it inside of your head, Unravelling is here to foster a more compassionate and informed perspective on life.

Kurt:

The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered medical advice. Always consult with a qualified health care professional for any health concerns. Take care of yourself out there.

Mary:

Welcome to Unravelling. This is a podcast that sees the world through the lens of mental health. I'm Mary Wilson, Wilson, a journalist.

Kurt:

And I'm Kurt White, a social worker and psychotherapist. And today, Mary, we're in Pride Month as as if you're listening to this when it comes out, it's so happy Pride. And we're in the midst of a series of episodes about, what's sometimes called conversion practices or what used to be called conversion therapy.

Mary:

That's right. Of course, that was a pseudoscience that's been debunked, and there's plenty of evidence to show now that those practices are harmful. And not just harmful to the person and, traumatic for that person, but harmful as we zoom out to a bigger picture too when it comes to economics.

Kurt:

Yeah. It's a a very interesting episode today. I I've been really excited about it because we get to talk to someone in a different field around one of the points of intersection of mental health and psychology with the larger social structure of things. That's a thing we love to do especially on Unravelling because really everything is connected to everything else.

Ben:

We

Kurt:

think about mental health, but it doesn't just exist out there. It exists we exist in context and social structures.

Mary:

Mhmm. Our mental health is entangled along with our economic lives, our education, the job we might get, and even the length of our life.

Kurt:

That's right. And sometimes when you really want to know what effect does something have, one way to look at it is to talk to one person or a couple of people, a group of people. But some is to look at broader trends. Do you see changes in rates of things, suicide rates, college attendance rates, economic performance in a family unit or an individual over the course of their lifetime. And sometimes certain kinds of economists that study these things study stuff like that.

Kurt:

That's actually how we found our guest today, through some research that he had done related to suicide and the effects of conversion therapy bans, And it turns out there's a link there, which we'll get into with him.

Mary:

Yeah. Professor Ben Harrell.

Kurt:

Yes. Professor Harrell is a health economist. He is the assistant professor of economics at Trinity University. He studies health disparities, health insurance, and mental health care markets. His most recent work explores how marginalized groups navigate health and health care in The US and how public policy shapes that navigation.

Mary:

Yeah. He brings a really interesting perspective to this, so let's take a listen.

Kurt:

Well, Ben, welcome to Unravelling.

Ben:

Thanks for having me, Kurt. This is great.

Kurt:

Absolutely. So I'm really excited to be able to talk with you and and get into some of the areas of interest and research that you have, especially around this issue of what's often called conversion therapy. There are other terms for it. I'd like to unpack some of that. But also, we'd just like to know, how did you get interested in this topic, especially given your background as as an economist?

Ben:

Yeah. So it's so interesting, this topic, because it's it's usually thought as a strictly therapeutic or psychological topic. But fundamentally, conversion therapy happens in markets for, mental health care. Right? There's a supply for it that has to meet the demand for people who are going out to find it.

Ben:

And I became interested in this question during my postdoc at Vanderbilt in the LGBTQ policy lab. My fellow postdoc and I were just kicking some ideas around of some of the issues faced by LGBTQ plus populations that drive some of the socioeconomic disparities we see between sexual and gender minorities and, their counterparts. And there was a paper at the time that had, come out in, the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics about the humanistic and socioeconomic costs of conversion therapy. And I became really interested in conversion therapy as a practice and kind of as a product that was being offered.

Kurt:

I find when I'm reading your work that I'm little bit shocked by the scope of of some of this, actually. I a lot of people maybe think this is something that existed historically or is a little bit around the fringes, but you you've really dug into the data and painted quite a different picture.

Ben:

Yeah. That's right. So you have to think of, you know, these practices that are called conversion therapy as not just a one off thing. You may think of the cost of conversion therapy and you may think of the fee that you pay to the therapist, but there's actually much more than that. There are sort of persistent mental health problems that follow uptake of conversion therapy.

Ben:

You know, increased rates of depression, anxiety, low self esteem, suicidal ideology. You know, the list goes on and on. That interrupts your life. It interrupts your career trajectory. It interrupts your educational trajectories.

Ben:

And so we see this interruption in the accumulation of human capital that people bring with them into the workforce and that sort of shapes their professional lives, moving forward. But there are soft costs too. Survivors of conversion therapy often report the feelings of compartmentalizing and and hiding portions of their lives, even disassociating, from their sexuality and their relationships, and those can have, consequences on your human accumulation as well.

Kurt:

This is why it's so valuable to talk to someone outside the field because therapists very rarely think of things like that, actually. Think, right, the downstream economic costs or personal humanistic costs, as you say, I think of sort of a cost to the person of, you know, missing out on this window of opportunity in one's life that maybe, you know, is hard to get again if you miss it, actually. Right? Something like that.

Ben:

Right. Some of these deleterious effects that follow uptake of conversion therapy, you're you're paying for not only are you paying for the conversion therapy, you're paying for the therapy to fix the conversion therapy.

Kurt:

Yeah. That's right. Just looking at my notes about numbers, right? I mean, we're talking in the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars if you really begin to look at the downstream costs. Can you say a little more about how that gets figured?

Kurt:

That's so interesting to me.

Ben:

Yeah. So this paper in JAMA Pediatrics does a really interesting job of using projection models from economics and related disciplines to sort of estimate wage differentials and salary differentials that come from these delays in human capital accumulation. And then they take averages from the benchmark mental health, negative effects of conversion therapy and, estimate costs for those and then they scale that by the probable number of survivors of conversion therapy in The US and sort of arrive at this range of figures. In my opinion as an economist, probably a slight overshot, but still a pretty solid estimate based on the methodology that they use.

Kurt:

I'm sort of wondering about the the business of doing this, I think, because it's it might be hard for therapists who are not interested in it or who are very much on the other side of it, like really most of the people I associate with as a sort of imagining it as being much of a thing. But I think sometimes there's a whole other world out there that that you can find if you go looking, and many people go looking to this, you know, perhaps to recommend to somebody for their own reasons, I guess, you know, a child or family member or somebody like that.

Ben:

In the majority, they're they're not happening. The Trevor Project did a study in, gosh, I think 2023 called it still happening. And they estimated some 12 to 1,300 practitioners of Conversion therapy in The The US and less than half of them were professionally licensed. So I think in a lot of these practices, you know, we hesitate to call them therapies as you've mentioned before. A lot of these practices happen in religious context.

Ben:

They're mostly informal. And so they become really difficult to regulate because they happen in informal markets.

Kurt:

I mean, sometimes I think I wouldn't know anyone to sell me drugs either, really. You know what I mean? But, like, people definitely get them. You know? They they remain popular, in fact.

Kurt:

And so, I mean, there are lot of things that therapists probably don't know about what people have encountered. And so I sort of approach it in that, partly from that point of view, that there are I'm always trying to put myself in the shoes of especially a young person that might be, maybe living in an environment where the sort of social context around them is not supportive of of who they actually are as a human being.

Ben:

Right. I think that's right. The majority of, well, I sorry. I'll say the modal person who takes up conversion therapy is gonna be a young white man who's evangelical between 18 and 30. Right?

Ben:

And so these are these are sort of cottage industries that pop up usually in religious communities or religiously affiliated that will that will serve these folks.

Kurt:

I I feel like recent, cultural events have showed a spotlight on these practices more than we have been used to seeing or hearing about, in the mainstream culture, at least for a number of years. And I think have also shown a light on that. The trans community is also having an experience of these practices that have historically been defined and talked about a little bit more in terms of sexual orientation rather than gender identity. How do you see the similarities and differences in this in in our broader culture?

Ben:

Kurt, it's the most bizarre experience for someone who came of age in the nineties and saw what we're seeing now with trans and gender expansive populations almost word for word, like the same terminology, the same sort of attacks that were trotted out against, gays and lesbians in the nineties are being directed towards trans folks now. And In some instances, it's quite jarring actually because I remember this and I remember the backlash to it. I remember how ineffective it ended up being in the long run. That both gives me a little bit of hope because there will be backlash to this and there will be a a course correction. But in the meantime, it is immensely harmful.

Ben:

It's dangerous. What's the the old saying? History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Kurt:

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I'm and I have a similar memory, you know, of the nineties in that way. I I mean, it's a it is like one of my mentors was a person who spoke out against conversion therapy practices in a very public way as a gay psychoanalyst therapist in Chicago in that time.

Kurt:

And it really sort of felt like the tide had turned, and and it is this it's same language that is is here is here again.

Ben:

You know, it's interesting that I I mentioned earlier that the modal person who takes up sexual orientation change efforts was gay males. But by the numbers, as a proportion of the population, the group most likely to be a victim of conversion therapy is a transgender individual. Something like twenty percent of gay men say they have experienced either pressure to or some form of conversion therapy, and it's it's closer to forty to fifty percent for trans folks according to to some estimates.

Kurt:

Wow. And there are, as you say, real harms to this. Right? I mean, at the at the individual level.

Ben:

There there are two broad wings of the social science research on, sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts. There's like the efficacy wing, you know, how effective are these practices for doing what they say they do, which is less developed. But the the most developed area of the literature on this is the research into the harms of sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts. This is the most compelling wing because the findings are the most persistent and replicable. And those are dramatic increases in rates of depression and anxiety, huge increase in the relative risk of suicide, large increases in suicidal ideation.

Ben:

As bad as these effects are for sexual minorities, like gay and lesbian and bisexual individuals, the risk of these negative events is even higher for transgender and gender expansive populations. In particular, the, increased rates to depression and suicidal ideation. There's actually a a large relative risk of running away for youth who are, forced into these practices. And so that causes family disruption and imagine how hard it is to go to college if you can't get your parents to fill out a FAFSA. That's the federal application for student financial aid which if anyone has ever enrolled in college, know how critical that piece of paperwork is and how important it is to have your parents sign off on it.

Ben:

You don't have any of your documents. You don't have your birth certificate. You don't have your Social Security card. So these familial interruptions become really, expose folks who run away practices to a high amount of economic risk as well. They live in a very precarious situation.

Kurt:

That's interesting. So this is these are some of the ways that the personal and the broader economic begin to connect, aren't they? The person who maybe would have been otherwise, you know, the prime of life doing well, heading off to college instead end up more struggling more at greater risk for suicide, more likely to perhaps have downstream health effects of not receiving counseling. Is that the link between some of this like that?

Ben:

Yeah. It's you said it earlier. Everything is connected to everything else. I love the overlap between, economics and our sister disciplines. Gary Becker is a Nobel Prize winning economist said that if a phenomenon affects the economy, it's the duty of economists to study it.

Ben:

And mental health touches every part of your economic life. Right? If your mental health is bad, you miss work. If your mental health is bad, you have degraded interpersonal relationships which have downstream consequences for your economic livelihood. It's kind of like you said earlier, we really have to stop thinking of, there being this dividing line between mental health and physical health and one's economic life.

Ben:

They are all tangled in a way that, can't be separated. Right? One affects the other. And the bidirectionally goes both ways.

Kurt:

On this issue of, like, human capital in a way, your as a therapist, help me understand that that term, and what that means and doesn't mean. That's not your value as a human, but your sort of monetary value to society in a way, something like that. Is that right?

Ben:

It's about productivity. Human capital is a form, it's training, it's education, it's experience. It can be as simple as reading, but it's anything that makes you more productive as a it makes you capable of accomplishing more in the same amount of time. You can think of yourself before you went to university and after you went to university and you're still essentially the same person, but the specialized training that you get in your field makes you able to accomplish the same amount of task in less time or even at all than had you not gotten that training. That essentially is what human capital is.

Ben:

It's skills, experience, and education.

Kurt:

Why is it then that these someone encountering these practices would would low lower that?

Ben:

Human capital is accumulated slowly and it is prone to interruption. Education is a process. It's an arc and there are important benchmarks along that process that, if they're not met or if they're interrupted, it can slow down the rate at which you accumulate that capital. But also, we can't ignore the fact that we are an enormously interconnected species. Our relationships matter.

Ben:

Our social connections matter. In addition to human capital, you've heard the term social capital before. Right? Like, Those sorts of things matter. Put yourself in the position of the kind of person who seeks out these practices, right?

Ben:

I've mentioned before, they almost exclusively, not exclusively, but almost exclusively happen in religious context. Imagine that for your entire life, the whole corpus of your social capital has been accumulated in the context of a religious community. And that religious community absolutely does not allow non heterosexual or non cisgender identities. Right? You have to preserve that capital or you have to start over from scratch.

Ben:

And so either way, you're facing a cost. That's sort of the hard mechanism. The soft mechanism is you want to think about the messages that are being communicated in these kinds of practices. The self is flawed. It cannot be trusted.

Ben:

It is prone to depravity and, degradation and you have to look to some external source. Well, a lot of integrating and building human capital requires a sort of trust in the self and autonomy. In as much as these practices teach the individual to not trust the self, to not trust in one's own autonomy or build one's own autonomy, that's just gonna degrade that process even further.

Kurt:

Yeah. That's such a wonderful explanation. Thank you. I I really I think if you are given a really incorrect idea about who you are in the world and that has profound consequences psychologically, socially, and economically, it sounds like it's a lot of effort to go back and do that again. It's possible.

Kurt:

Right? I mean, I'm a therapist. I'm in that business of definitely like, we can do it. But, oh, there times where I feel like I wish someone had just said to someone a long time ago, like, you're fine. You're fine.

Kurt:

This is all fine. Right? I just wanna, you know, wrap my arms around them and say like, no. No. You're you're just you're just a kid that need to be loved for who you were, not who someone else wanted you to be.

Kurt:

It could have been so much simpler.

Ben:

Yeah. We've talked about some of the direct costs of, you know, these practices, you know, where people have to seek out, you know, years of therapy after they either find peace with themselves or in ongoing therapy where they're still wrestling with this these questions of identity and that struggle can be expensive. But it's it's about more than just money as you've mentioned, It's about peace with yourself and peace with who you are as a person, and you can't put a price on that.

Kurt:

Yeah. Yeah. And I'm I'm interested in that that sort of disproportionate effect on youth also. Is that, I mean, I I have my own ideas as a therapist about why that why that might be, but do you do you have a sense of that yourself too? Or

Ben:

Yeah. There's there's so much identity formation that's happening in adolescence. One of the common, pushbacks that you will hear often from LGBTQ plus folks, Yeah. There's all of these stereotypes about Peter Pan syndrome and, you know, delayed adulthood. And while our heterosexual and cisgender counterparts in high school were going on dates and figuring out what it meant to be in a relationship in a safe controlled environment with, you know, parental and community supervision.

Ben:

Queer kids often, especially in places like the South and the Midwest, are trying to figure these things out either online or in the dark, and that exposes all sorts of dangers, especially online. You know, much has been said about online, sexual exploitation of minors and, you know, a lot of this comes from LGBTQ youth seeking out some sense of community and identity online because they're just not getting that in their day to day lives. Albert Einstein said there's, no more powerful force in the universe than compound interest. And that applies to the the compound interest of the the emotional and psychological pain that, this lack of acceptance and these constant messages of you're not right, you need to change. This compounds over time in the same way that investment works.

Ben:

The earlier you start, the greater your balance is in adulthood. The same thing applies to the burden of these practices. Being subjected to these practices as a young person is a much has a much higher cost because it compounds over time. Even though perhaps surprisingly to many people, the majority of folks who take up these practices are actually young adults. But it's really really important to protect kids and teens from these practices, which is why the vast majority of efforts to ban these practices across The US specifically apply to minors.

Kurt:

And you've done some work on on those bans, actually. They're they're not they're not they 're not just for show. They actually have an impact as part of what you you found. Right? I was really interested in this.

Kurt:

Yeah.

Ben:

Yeah. So, I've done some work on this, and there's some really good work published recently in the journal Health Services Research that finds that state level statutory bans in conversion therapy practices are associated with, for high school students, something like five percentage points, five percentage points decrease in suicidal ideation. It's a developing research area. So both my work and the the work that's been published in health services research are not without their flaws, but our best estimates are that these bans help young people. They insulate young people somewhat from some of these deleterious effects.

Ben:

Some of the ways they do that are by interrupting these networks of providers. You see folks like Joseph Nicolosi who had to move his He was one of the fathers of modern conversion therapy practices in The US who moved his practice out of California following California's twenty thirteen ban of sexual orientation change efforts. These bans happen on multiple levels. So there's there's state level statutory bans. There have been municipal bans.

Ben:

But the the sort of bite how these these bans work, like I said, by interrupting these, networks of providers is by imposing sanctions from professional and licensure organizations. The intuition behind these bans is right. The the source of the demand for sexual orientation change efforts and gender identity change efforts comes from a protected class. Right? On average, it comes from a protected class religion.

Ben:

Right? And we don't wanna tell people how to, you know, practice their own faiths and religion and definitely don't wanna get into regulating that. But if we can't regulate the demand, we can at least try our hand at regulating the supply. And so most of these bans follow the, the legislative language of, California's 2013 ban which, was I believe, SB eleven seventy two. And it, focuses on, licensure, right, and and pulling licensure or or providing penalties for licensure.

Kurt:

You know, most I mean, maybe most nontherapists don't know that we don't ban that many things, actually, like as in therapists. We do very different kinds of therapy for similar problems. I mean, most of it is just talking. We have some restrictions on what kinds of relationships you can have with a therapist and the basic sort of boundaries of it that were once not followed very well, actually, right, in the earlier days of things and before practices got established for a reason. And the reason was that over and over and over again, what you saw when that happened was people got harmed.

Kurt:

And when that happens, it's sort of like, well, can't why can't I do that? Well, you can't do that because you're gonna get hurt if you do that. Right? It's like same reason you can't drive a 120 miles an hour on the expressway. Right?

Kurt:

You might hurt someone else, but you'll get hurt yourself. And and I do think there's a power to the idea that society should do something to tell us about things that we know to be harmful actually, right? The way that we do that can be you could argue about it, I guess, right? But a harmful thing is a harmful thing. And so many states have passed these bans because that's what where the evidence is pointing, I think.

Kurt:

Right? It's it's it's a pretty high bar to clear.

Ben:

It it really is. And in fact, part of the reason I became interested in, in particular sexual orientation change effort bans is because there was a lot of research on what happens with survivors of conversion therapy. And sort of the criticism of that work from supporters of these practices was that, you know, these studies were were retrospective and they were based on folks' recollection and people may be biased toward these practices. But I was really interested in well, we have all of this evidence of what happens after taking up conversion therapy. What happens when you statutorily ban it?

Ben:

And not even completely statutorily ban it because to be clear, and this is written into the legislative language, these bans do not apply to the majority of practitioners of sexual orientation change efforts. These only apply to practitioners who are licensed. And so the most conservative estimates of the effect of banning these practices or showing improvements. So to me, it's a it's just a no brainer.

Kurt:

I I would like to talk a little more about the the future legal the current and future legalities of this, You know, because we're now in this arena of, federal courts striking down state bans. What do you imagine the future constitutionality of this these practices will be?

Ben:

It's unclear because Charles V. Salazar doesn't explicitly legalize these practices. It doesn't say anything about the safety or efficacy of these practices. It doesn't prevent licensure bodies from, like the American Psychological Association or the the AMA from saying these practices are unethical, it just removes the ability of these bodies to sanction practitioners. I imagine that professional bodies will continue to say that these practices are, unethical and that members in good standing should not do them, but they will just not be able to impose financial penalties.

Ben:

It's gonna be interesting to see if licensure bodies will be able to suspend licenses as a form of punishment. But my reading of the case, and I'm I'm no legal scholar, so again, take this with as many grains of salt as you like, is that the justices specifically said strict scrutiny needs to be applied to this because it's a it's a view it's a viewpoint. So we're going to need to see how challenges to this, not challenges to the decision, but workarounds to this decision will be formed. Though I imagine based on what I hear in advocacy communities for the time being conversion following this decision, advocacy around conversion therapy is probably gonna be taking a backseat to some of the more existential threats to the community. I mean, Ohio is trying to effectively ban gender affirming care.

Ben:

So, you know, there are, there are other fish to fry so to speak at the at the moment. But I I hope we, I I hope we come back to this and I hope legal scholars, you know, the the Williams Institute has really led the charge on this at UCLA. I hope legal scholars at the Williams Institute, and other advocacy organizations, really start working on this because overturning these bans, think, is gonna cause a lot of harm.

Kurt:

And I think I mean, many folks would see the efforts to roll back, you know, affirming treatments as not unrelated to the efforts, here, you know, despite what a lot of folks say, that no, no, this is a narrow thing about language and free speech or something like that. Right? This is about how welcoming or unwelcoming is the whole environment of society to, you know, a person's being and who they are. Yeah.

Ben:

I think that's right. I think a lot of people have a misconception of what gender affirming care looks like for older adolescents, you know, folks who are, between the ages of, 16 and 18. And maybe maybe even a little bit younger who are being put on puberty blockers just to give themselves time to to figure out, issues of identity. That, you know, it's so jarring to hear the language of of free choice being used as a defense for overturning these bans, but being ignored for parents and and older teens who just want time to figure out what the right medical decision for them is and and to ban the mechanism that would give them just just a little time to to figure out. The language of liberty has often been, employed both for and against the queer community in in ways that is really strange to me.

Kurt:

Yeah. And I and it's, you know, the data that I've seen on gender affirming care, for example, has been really good. I think it's actually been better than than than even my mentors in the nineties thought it would be, where there was still a worry about surgical regret and things like that. It really just hasn't panned out that way at all. Like, it's this thing that has a bunch of even surgical interventions have a much lower rate of surgical regret than most common surgeries do, right, which is a wild thing to say.

Kurt:

So it's

Ben:

And and they're they're also the most rare kind of gender affirming care. Right? The most common kind of gender affirming care is our hormone therapies or puberty blockers. Like, there's there's a real the the language du jour used by, those who are opposed to the the transgender and gender expansive communities are are words like mutilation. Right?

Ben:

No one is like, first of all, this is not happening. And and second of all, as you just said earlier, the rates of regret on these surgeries is so low. It's it's just disappointing how much traction this language, which has no basis in reality, is getting.

Kurt:

I I'm always trying to keep in mind maybe the younger folks that are listening or maybe parents of those younger folks. If if we were doing nothing other than talking to them today, what would you wanna what would you wanna say about all of this landscape in closing?

Ben:

Maybe I'll start with the parents. I to the parents, I would say, the most important thing you can do for your child who is questioning or struggling with their sexual or gender identity is to give them a safe space to come to you and talk about those things in a nonjudgmental context where they can feel free to ask you questions and tell you how they're feeling. I think what most young, folks who may or may not be queer, they may just be, figuring things out. I think what they're most afraid of is rejection. And you can stay faithful to your beliefs and your core values while also not harming your child.

Ben:

There is a balance there. So find that balance and just be a safe place. What I would say to the kids is there's nothing wrong with you. There's absolutely nothing wrong with you. Look at the data on, folks who are coming out who are your age.

Ben:

We have a larger share of the population now than we ever have, that is identifying, as some flavor of LGBTQ plus. And you don't you don't have to adopt any label. Just just you're you're a kid. Figure out who you are. You've got plenty of time to do it.

Ben:

And what I would say to the young adults, especially young adults who, identify as Christian or or some other faith, that that is opposed to being LGBTQ plus is just take some time and explore members of your faith community. Explore places in your faith community that are affirming. Just give it a shot. If you're a Christian, go to an affirming church. I promise you, you can find them in your area and and just see what it's like.

Ben:

No one is make is requiring you to make a choice. Just go. See how you feel. And, not everyone is preaching the same message that you're listening to. And overall, I would just say there is no sin in discovering who you are.

Ben:

Right? Self discovery is a generative process, and it will never steer you wrong.

Kurt:

Yeah. Well, Ben, thank you so much for talking with us today. I really, really enjoyed it and learned a lot.

Ben:

Thank you, Kurt, for having me on. I so enjoy talking to folks from other disciplines because I always learn a lot too.

Kurt:

Many thanks again to doctor Harrell for his time, generosity, experience, and perspective on all of this. Joining me again here is Mary.

Mary:

Yeah. That was a wonderful conversation, and it was just so profound how he was able to talk about these different datasets, but then also speak to the individual and people who are really going through these issues right now.

Kurt:

I found it very moving too. I the way he just pulls everything together from the social level down to the individual. And he left us just where we need to be, I think, which is centering the experiences of people out there who may be interested in needing to seek mental health treatment for whatever reason, and who also may be LGBTQ identified or may be questioning that or questioning their gender identity. We will definitely put links in the show notes so that people can have some resources.

Mary:

And he has a lot more research to share. We will link his personal website where you can learn more about him as a person and also his research.

Kurt:

I sure would hope to talk to him again sometime. And until then, happy Pride Month, everybody.

Mary:

Yes. Happy Pride, and we'll see you next time.

Kurt:

Unravelling is brought to you by Brattleboro Retreat. Our producers at Charts and Leisure are Andrew Adkin, Hans Buteau, and Jason Oberholzer.

Mary:

And you can find us on social media by searching Brattleboro Retreat. Brattleboro Retreat is committed to exploring diverse perspectives on mental health. While we invite hosts and guests to share their insights, the views expressed are their own and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of the hospital or its staff.