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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.
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 Unraveling. This is a podcast that sees the world through the lens of mental health. I'm Mary Wilson, a journalist.
Kurt:And I'm Curt White, a social worker and psychotherapist. If you're listening as these episodes come out, we're in the midst of June Pride Month, and our tradition on the podcast of trying to use that time to center the voices and experiences, especially as they relate to mental health of people in the LGBTQIA plus community.
Mary:Yeah. And we thought it was a timely issue to explore conversion practices, which many might know as conversion therapy, but that term is not used anymore because it's been debunked as a therapy.
Kurt:Yeah. I think even even the idea of using that term might give people the wrong idea about it. These are practices done, I mean, sometimes by therapists, but they're broadly seem to be an unethical branch of a thing that a therapist might do. In some states, an illegal thing. That's part of what's controversial about it at the moment.
Kurt:There's some some current wranglings about that. But the major professional boards are against it. But it's also done outside of therapy communities and really wouldn't be considered a therapy in that sense, but as an effort to change someone's sexual orientation, attraction, or gender identity to be other than what it simply is.
Mary:And it does have quite a dark history, which we are going to get into a bit today, and some listeners may find some of this quite disturbing.
Kurt:We're gonna go all the way back to the nineteen sixties and seventies and talk to one of the pioneers in helping the field to think differently about these conversion practices, but was involved with those practices in part of his early career.
Mary:Yeah. And really took a brave stand against these conversion practices.
Kurt:Yeah. And has been really recognized in subsequent decades as someone who helped to move the field along to the place where it is now. Obviously, still a lot more work to do around that. That's part of why we're talking about it. But where at least these practices really understood to be not only ineffective, but really immoral and inappropriate.
Mary:So Curt, tell us more about Doctor. Gerald Davison.
Kurt:Well, Doctor. Davison was brought to our attention by a friend of the show, Doctor. Namdi Pohl, who knew him from some of his training. He is a professor of psychology and gerontology at the University of Southern California, where he's been for decades. He's a fellow of the American Psychological Association, has served on many distinguished boards and committees, and had different appointments at other universities.
Kurt:He's a distinguished founding fellow and certified supervisor at the Academy of Cognitive Therapy. He's received outstanding achievement awards from the American Psychological Association's Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility. He's received the awards for a distinguished contribution by an ally from the division of that association of APA that for the psychology of sexual orientation and gender diversity. And he has over a 150 publications. And recently, a documentary was made about his seminal role in discouraging sexual reorientation practices called Conversion that's viewable online, and we'll put a link to it in the show notes.
Mary:Looking forward to hearing his story.
Kurt:Doctor. Gerald Davison, welcome to Unravelling.
Dr. Davison:Thank you very much.
Kurt:I'm, really excited to talk with you because you're a person that has been thinking about and working in this area of the field of psychology and psychotherapy for many decades, thinking about conversion therapy. What does it mean? How are some of its harms, for example? And you have an interesting personal experience with that that starts really at the beginning of your career. And I wonder if we could maybe set the stage for that a little bit, sort of talk about how you first started thinking about those issues, and what the field was like at that time.
Dr. Davison:Okay, well I was sort of, I guess you say, second generation behavior therapist. I was lucky enough to be in graduate school at Stanford, starting in 1962, and at that time, it was one of the few places where people were doing anything about behavior therapy within the field. And I had a chance to be an advisee to Albert Bandura, who was one of the early pioneers of behavior therapy, and then to spend a year with Arnold Lazarus, who was a visiting faculty member from South Africa, who had trained with Wolpey, another leader in the field. So I got in sort of on the ground floor of the beginnings of this field. I learned that one of the earliest applications of what we'll call behavior therapy was with what they called sexual deviations, in particular homosexuality.
Dr. Davison:And that's the way homosexuality was thought about at that time, well into the sixties and seventies. And it was mostly aversion therapy, which entailed shocking people when they had a thought that you wanted to eliminate. If a gay person had a thought about a man and got aroused, you'd shock him for it.
Kurt:Physically shock him with an electrical current.
Dr. Davison:On the fingertips. Electroshock through the head, but on the fingertips. And this trying to attach a painful negative reaction to the thought of homosexual sex. So that was at the beginnings of behavior therapy. I got my PhD at 65, and I had a postdoctoral, then I went to Stony Brook, which was an early PhD program that was specializing in behavior therapy.
Dr. Davison:We were all very of young and enthusiastic and almost messianic in our devotion to the field. And I was seeing patients both in the clinic, in the psych clinic, and supervising patients. I had a small practice myself. And some of the patients that I saw were gay men. And I didn't want to do aversion therapy.
Dr. Davison:It frankly offended me. Something about it just inflicting pain on another person, it bothered me. And so I looked for positive ways to try to help. It was men more than women, very few women were seeking out sexual reorientation, at least who were consulting with male therapists. And I decided to use sexual arousal and emphasize the positive.
Dr. Davison:So I developed what was called playboy therapy, and I thought it was working. I had a few clients that I thought it was working with. Well, it wasn't working. It was having no effect on the sexual orientation. And then, for me, the pivotal moment came in 1972 at the meeting of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy, which is the main it's an international organization of behavior therapists all around the world.
Dr. Davison:And I was giving a workshop on this new positive way to help male homosexual, primarily male, get chaired on by women. And in that meeting was a man named Charles Silverstein. I knew who he was. I was at Stony Brook at the time, and he was graduate student at Rutgers. And during a break, he came up to me, and he said, we're having a symposium later on the last day of the convention, and maybe you'd like to oh, could I hand out circulars to the group, the workshop group of mine, which was about 20 people?
Dr. Davison:And I said, sure. And then he said, well, maybe you'd like to take a copy with you. And I looked at it, and I and I had a, you know, sort of mild neutral to negative reaction in that I said, oh, these are the these gay radical guys, and they're gonna bad mouth behavior therapists. And, I wasn't sure that, I mean, I was quite sure that I was not going to attend it, but I, I wasn't going to make a fuss about it. I was late at the last day of the meeting.
Dr. Davison:I was on my way out. I I realized I was I was not gonna make it down to Penn Station, so I thought I'd hang around the hotel. I reached into my literally, into my pocket and found this this crumpled up flyer about Schlumberstein's symposium. And I said, oh, what the hell? I have time.
Dr. Davison:And it was right nearby. So I I went into this meeting room where it was being held. So it wasn't so much a diatribe. It was quite a reasoned argument against behavior therapists trying to change gay men and pointing out the sexual oppression that gay people are under, and that basically it's unreasonable for them to want not to be gay because everyone's telling them it's really bad to be gay. You're sinful.
Dr. Davison:You're sick. You're whatever.
Kurt:And and is that is that why people would come in for that as a problem? I mean, is that I mean, these folks were coming for help in a way. Right? They they were also experiencing this as an upsetting internal thing for them. Right?
Dr. Davison:Yes. They were they really were in pain. They wanted very much to they wanted to be part of society, they didn't want people telling them that they're sick. They didn't want their parents throwing a fit, being excluded from friends, and there was a lot that society has set up a an environment for them that made it unpleasant to be the way they were. And Silverstein said, this is not good.
Dr. Davison:You know? You're doing bad things by trying to help them. Well, this sort of something in my head clicked. I said, oh, that's what they're talking about. These folks were really angry and, suddenly fell into place as to, gee, am I doing them any favor by trying to help them change?
Dr. Davison:For two reasons. One reason is empirical. Does it work? And I was beginning to realize, you know, I don't think it does. And the second reason, which is more important, is is it the right thing to do?
Dr. Davison:Is it ethical? Is it moral? Whether it works or not. And I decided in agreement with Silverstein and the radical gay folks, I was not doing a good thing. I literally got back home that night, a Sunday night, and Monday went into school, and I'd had I'd had this epiphany.
Dr. Davison:I've had this realization, you know, everything I've been working on for the past three or four years, it was wrong. It was wrongheaded. And so I talked to my colleagues and students about it, and my colleagues, my faculty colleagues, to a person, were very unhappy with me. They thought I'd lost my marbles. What had happened to me, you know, you've been doing good work, and some were cautioning me this is not going to be good for your career, and so forth.
Dr. Davison:And when I talked to the graduate students, they were much more open to it. They said, this is interesting. I think I think that's I think that's good, you know, that you're not gonna do it anymore. By coincidence, that year, I was president-elect of AABT. So I was in in a couple of years, I'd be past president.
Dr. Davison:Now that's important because the past presidents, they give a speech, and it's a speech that most people in the meeting go to. And I decided I would make this the theme of my speech, and I'd have a couple years to work on it. And by this point, I'd be I'd become kind of colleague or even a friend with Chuck Silverstein, and we talk about it. And I told Chuck about my plans. He said, that's great, Jerry, but be warned that people will think that you're gay, that that would be bad for you, and people will think you're not, thinking straight, won't be good for your career.
Dr. Davison:So in one way or another, it would be bad for me to do it. And my response to Chuck was, well, it happens that I'm not gay, but that's irrelevant. I don't care whether I think I'm gay or not, but more importantly, I felt I had to do it. It just seemed like it was wrong. The whole field was wrong.
Dr. Davison:The whole you have to understand at this time, practically no one was working in what we called a gay affirmative manner with gay people, at least that most people knew about. They certainly weren't publishing very much about it. And in November 1974, I gave the speech, and there's a point in the speech where I say, therefore, I'm saying we should not engage in sexual orientation with our gay patients. And then I said, even if they ask for it. And this was the thing that really drove some people nuts.
Dr. Davison:Who am I to deny treatment to a patient? And my reaction was, we do it all the time. There are certain things that practitioners of any kind will not do. That was the point in the speech when the room got very silent. And then afterwards, about a dozen people came down to the front where I was standing, and they were in their twenties and thirties, some older, and some of them were crying, literally crying, weeping.
Dr. Davison:And they said, I can't believe what you said. That's wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. It was very emotional.
Dr. Davison:Then a few minutes later, I joined. There was a reception after my speech. And when I went there, I noticed people were kind of backing away from me. They seemed embarrassed. It took about, I don't know, six or eight months for me to revise the speech into a manuscript to submit to a journal.
Dr. Davison:I submitted it to American Psychologists, and it was rejected. And it was rejected without review. In other words, the editor decided it was inappropriate for the journal, so he would not send it out for review that he himself made the decision. I wish I had kept that letter because the letter said something like, it's not of enough general interest to the membership. And I thought, that that doesn't sound right.
Dr. Davison:You may not like what I wrote, but to be judged that it's not of general interest thought to me was, seemed to me, quite wrongheaded. So I then revised it a little bit and sent it into the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, which was the principal clinical psychology journal within APA at the time. And the response I got from the editor, a man named Brendan Maher, was a professor at the time at Harvard, was like the first editor. He said, I'm not gonna send it out for review. And I thought, oh god.
Dr. Davison:Not again. And he said, because I'm gonna accept it. I'm gonna accept it the way it is, provided that, you you're okay with getting some reinvited critiques of the paper. And he and I thought, that's great. Wonderful.
Dr. Davison:So in the field, it began to then gain traction, as you say. People began to become aware of it. And I was visiting him at Harvard at the time when I got Brendan Marr was the editor of this journal. He received a manuscript from a couple of colleagues at another university critiquing my paper. And their basic argument was, no.
Dr. Davison:You really can change. But if we cannot do it yet, we just have to devise better strategies. We should work harder to help change sexual orientation. So I read the manuscript, and I thought, this is totally wrongheaded. They've missed the point.
Dr. Davison:It's not a question of whether we can do it. It's a question of whether we ought to do it.
Kurt:It's very interesting to me, because I think you're clearly on the issue of conversion therapy, you're leading the field into a different way of thinking about this, inviting them in, maybe kicking and screaming in some instances about it, but also changing minds along the way. And also, I think inviting the field into a different way to think about its own ethics, it seems to me. Is I mean, it's you're saying something, I think, really new and different to folks, which is which is, I I think, very profound, this idea of it's not just about should, but also about ought. Even there are oughts that even transcend the sort of will of the individual to want something different for themselves.
Dr. Davison:Yeah. It's a complex argument, but it's one which the field needs to have. This is where my inspiration for this came from, I think, two people. One is a man named Seymour Halleck, who I mentioned before, who published a book in 1971 that was called The Politics of Therapy. And I quote him in my article.
Dr. Davison:Basically, he says that even in confidential private therapy setting, the social context is not absent. You're part of a context, and you have to you should pay attention to the social context because everything you do has political and ethical implications. We talked about the politics of it, the power relationships. And the other influence on me was a former adviser, mentor of mine, Perry London. London wrote a wonderful book, came out in 1964, called The Modes and Morals of Psychotherapy.
Dr. Davison:And in that book, The Modes, he talked about behavior therapy, and particularly behavior therapy in contrast to psychoanalysis and humanistic existential. The morals is very important. The morals of psychotherapy, he coined the term secular priest, and his basic point was that in our society, therapists have become society's secular priests, that people come to therapists with questions which, you know, in earlier generations they might have taken to a clergy, a member of the clergy. You know, what should I do? Is this wrong?
Dr. Davison:Is this right? Now people are asking that question of their therapists. And the therapists then are we are then cast in this role that very two of us have had any training in. I, in fact, explicitly had no training in it because I was told in graduate school and throughout my earlier, career that that was not your business. Your business was the technology, if you will.
Dr. Davison:You're the change agent. The choice of what to work towards is the patient's.
Kurt:Yeah. Yeah. It's often generally understood even now, right, as a fine ethical principle, right, is the self determination. Yeah.
Dr. Davison:But the problem is the problem is that patients are influenced by their society. If you shift from to the strictly intrapsychic problems of a patient and look at the patient's problems in a larger sort of social context, you realize that our attitudes and wishes are shaped by our society. We are children of our culture, and the things that influence us, sometimes we're not aware of the influences. The phrase that I've used is a fish doesn't know he's swimming in the water. It's a wonderful phrase.
Dr. Davison:Fish is unaware of the water that they're in. We're not aware of our atmosphere. We're not aware of social influences until we sort of pay attention to them. And I think all therapists, including your colleagues, are aware of these factors, macro factors, if you will, and we have to make a decision about do we buy into that? And we have to be explicit, I believe, with our patients and say, look, this is why I don't think it's right for me to do this with you, and explain to them, as I began to do with patients whom I was seeing, and they were just fine with not going along with the reorientation.
Dr. Davison:It suited them better to be thinking about the context they're in, which is the political argument.
Kurt:And that gets at this whole idea that maybe there's an ideal in psychotherapy or a sort of purported ideal among many, at least, that there's a neutrality underneath things, right, that there maybe is a kind of unspoken, some unspoken absolutes that we don't talk about very much, but under but on top of that is this great neutrality. And if I'm understanding you correctly, you've really said that's that's not how it is. It can it can never really be that way. Right?
Dr. Davison:Exactly. This idea of this was Hallux's point: therapeutic neutrality is a myth. We all sort of have the same value systems, and so we don't have to question them. But it's when we make a mistake in not considering that, we have to, at all times, keep in mind what the value of system is.
Kurt:I have a couple questions for you about this whole arc that you've described. I think you're describing something really remarkable, I think in terms of the way that you really held on to challenging the field at a time that it must have been very difficult to do that. I mean, I think your older colleagues were probably right in a way that it was a very risky move for you. You know, it could have ended your career or marginalized you in a certain way or jeopardized your, you know, efforts to get tenure or whatever. I'm not quite sure what, but something like that.
Kurt:And there were people that were harmed in that way at that time too. Right? That wasn't just purely theoretical. You find them and also the enormous internal stress of it. And I wonder was it that you held on to inside of yourself, you know, to to sort of keep keep going with that when it would have been clearly much easier not to in a lot of ways?
Dr. Davison:People are aware of things that are bothersome, that they don't think they're right. And each of us makes a decision to feel quiet or to not keep quiet. Some of us, we kid ourselves when we say, I don't want to interfere. I will be neutral. And that's not true.
Dr. Davison:It's a good rationalization. To say nothing is to sanction the status quo. So all of us have to, whether we like it or not, we're making decisions all the time. I guess one context to provide is when Silverstein made his speech in 1972, I had just been promoted to full professor at Stony Brook. Now I had been promoted a few years earlier to associate professor.
Dr. Davison:Both were tenured positions. So I felt very secure professionally. I didn't think, you know, you could lose those positions, but professionally, I saw, yeah, I could lose some professional Sam. And I guess I was stubborn. I guess I felt strongly enough about this that it was worth the risk.
Dr. Davison:And I also felt, since I was pretty well established in the field, that people were less likely to reject out of hand, to derogate the communicator and say, oh, you don't know what you're talking about, since I had a track record of doing work that showed that I knew what I was talking about. Even if people didn't always agree, they couldn't say, you know, you're stupid, or your research methodology is lousy, or you wrote it up badly. I guess I also I just this is something that younger people today may not understand. It was very risky to be in the field of behavior therapy in the late sixties, early seventies.
Kurt:The psychoanalytic paradigm was the very, very much stronger one in this country and in Europe also.
Dr. Davison:We were derogated all the time, insulted. I mean, got very personal something, idea of panels and you know, these very personal attacks. So we were sort of used to it. Stony Brook was a pioneer in behavior therapy. Stony Brook created this program in 1966 under the leadership of a man named Leonard Krasner, who was director of clinical training, and Harry Kalish, who was chairman of the department.
Dr. Davison:This was a new department at a new university, and it was going to be bold new directions for higher education. And the psychology department's clinical psychology program was avowedly behavior therapy oriented at a time when it was extremely unpopular. You were discounted. You were harshly criticized. We, in fact, were worried that our graduate students would have trouble getting clinical internships because they hadn't been thoroughly steeped in the prevailing paradigms, and they had not learned projective testing, whatever.
Dr. Davison:And we decided we would be bold, and we would make the argument, well, you don't need this stuff. And we were right. It turned out that places were fortunately interested in this, and they found our students, because we had really great students, and I think we educated them well, and they liked our students as interns. They were good clinicians, and they were eager to learn things. I remember a couple of students saying, you know, I'm on this internship, it's great, but instead of getting supervision from my supervisor, he's asking me to teach him behavior therapy.
Dr. Davison:And we thought, Well, that's a great sign. And our advice to the student was sort of trade off with the person. Give your supervisor an hour, he or she should give you two hours of their clinical supervision. So that's when we thought, it helped us think we're not on a bad track, know, it's not going to harm our students. And it turned out to be correct.
Dr. Davison:I mean, these cognitive behavior therapies is a very broad field that is widely accepted, I don't know whether it's dominant, but it's close to it as far as theoretical orientation for mental health professionals.
Kurt:Oh, absolutely. It also strikes me that there's parallel in the immediate contemporary era to what you were talking about also, especially in the recent Supreme Court decision about conversion therapy and people's views about trans identity as less of a a public issue at that time. It was much more underground. It existed, but it was underground. And and I'm curious if you have thoughts about the sort of the resurgence of some of these same arguments that you've argued against decades ago?
Dr. Davison:Well, I'm about to say I don't want get overly political, but I think you have to. I think it's impossible to discuss what you're rightly pointing to as sort of a reversion, or some might soon call it the the great regression. It's it's because of the Republican right wing control of our politics and of the narrative, if you will. I don't think these things can be disentangled. And we have some versions of Orthodox religions of one kind or another are taking a hard line position on this and quoting from the Bible was laying down with a man as if a woman, whatever the I don't know what exact quotes are.
Dr. Davison:It's, again, it's part of the social context, and it's happening. And Chuck Solestein warned against this during the first Trump administration, in fact, and it's an issue, and we all have to be cognizant of this and decide where do our values lie and what are we prepared to put up with.
Kurt:And just to note, right, there's also ample evidence that there are harms caused by this kind of therapy, right? It's not just ineffective, but actually can contribute to really an increase in psychological distress and associated symptoms and harm. Isn't that right?
Dr. Davison:Yeah. The harms part, what we call the iatrogenic effects, a few years ago, co authored, wrote a paper with a student of mine, Kyla Rose Walden, for the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology called The History and iatrogenic Effects of Conversion Therapy. We start the article with the Hippocratic goals, above all, do no harm. And that's for medicine, goes for all helping professionals. Put another way, at least don't make the person worse off.
Dr. Davison:If you can't help them, okay, that's unfortunate. But if in addition, if your efforts to help them are doomed to failure, as they are in my view with conversion therapy, they're unlikely to end up feeling better about themselves. Here I am, I feel rotten about being gay, I go to this doctor, I'm paying a lot of money, someone's paying for it, effort, I guess subjected to this conversion treatment. Some of it's physically painful, some of it's mentally painful, spiritually painful, and then I don't change. What does that make me?
Dr. Davison:I'm really sick. I'm really depraved. It's unlikely to end up with an increase in a positive self regard, but rather a negative. So that would be a strong negative effect.
Kurt:Yeah. Yeah. One last question, think. And I'm curious, I had it in my head too about the idea of the psychotherapist as the secular priest and the ways that people look to psychotherapy. And I think you raised that in the context of the harms that sometimes can happen if we're not then sort of careful to check ourselves in terms of our own biases or hidden assumptions even in the culture or society at large.
Kurt:But also, I mean, there are times where I think sometimes the field leads the culture at large maybe into a better and a more accurate understanding of humanity or something like that. Right? Doesn't that mean we have even sometimes unethical experiments like the Milgram experiments? Does that maybe tell us something about the way that we're organized? And I'm curious what you think about that.
Kurt:If you think that, like, should people maybe diminish the the sort of importance of the of the of the mental health therapist as sort of advice or about the nature of humanity, or should we just make sure that our methods are the sort of most ethical ones?
Dr. Davison:I think the latter. I think that we do have ways to help people and make changes, not just behavior therapists. There's a lot of ways to help people feel better. So I think it's a noble profession. I'm very happy to be in the business.
Dr. Davison:I don't feel that I've wasted my time. I feel that colleagues, people like me, have more or less helped more people than we haven't. I'm just saying we should broaden our perspective and pay more attention to what's going on in the world around us, and not be so narrowly focused on the intrapsychic, what's going on inside the person's behavior in psyche, or soul, or mind, but we have to consider the external factors. These variables have never been ignored. Experimental psychology, on which behavior therapy is based, from the very beginning was concerned with the stimuli and responses and things going on outside the organism.
Dr. Davison:We weren't unaware of these factors at all. But it's a question of how much, given that you're aware of them, let's have a look, let's not forget about them when we're dealing with the individual. In general terms, that's my plea that we not forget that people are operating within a particular framework. I've been teaching a seminar in cognitive behavior therapy to advanced undergraduates, And Albert Ellis is one of, well, a somewhat controversial figure in the field, and somewhat stylistic, but I've always been an admirer, and I see the essence of Ellis's theory we call rationally motivated behavior therapy. At its core, it's it's a ethical system.
Dr. Davison:Ellis, at the very core, basically says that it's not healthy to be so overly concerned about what other people think you should be doing, that you shouldn't be laying shoulds on yourself. And it's very close to Carl Rogers. It's it's a question of values. It's not just technology. It's not how to change irrational belief.
Dr. Davison:What is an irrational belief? You know? Or how to change, in Aaron Beck's terms, make people more accurate in their perception of things. Yes, these are important factors, but lying behind it are the questions of, you know, how to live the good life. And these are ethical, these are secular priest type questions, and they're they're inherent to the to the nature of the field, and I don't think to ignore them is a folly.
Dr. Davison:I have to remind students that before the internet, if you wanted a book on psychology, it was generally filed P H I L, and then there was a number. P H I L stands for philosophy. It was coded under philosophy, because that's what psychology grew out of. And it was what the Germans call a Geistes Wissenschaft. It was a concern with the soul of the mind, and not so much with what they call Naturwissenschaft, which is natural science.
Dr. Davison:And we're very much a part of that. We're caught between these two poles. Some psychology departments, for example, like ours, recently changed calling ourselves a natural science. And we had we took a vote on that in the department, and I voted against it. I said I said, I think we're losing something.
Dr. Davison:Is there a is there a third alternative? It's like both. We're both in the social and humanities part, and we're also in the natural science part. That's part of why I think psychology is really cool. And clinical psychology is very much the case.
Dr. Davison:So I tell students this is an intellectually very complex and satisfying field to be operating in. Just keep your eyes open to why you're doing what you're doing.
Kurt:Doctor. Davison, thank you so much for joining us on Unraveling.
Dr. Davison:You're very welcome. It's been a pleasure.
Kurt:And thank you again to Doctor. Davison for that really interesting conversation. I learned a lot about history that I didn't know.
Mary:Yeah. Yeah. Me too. And it got me thinking of how hard it is for someone in a profession to really go against the grain and stand up for what is moral. In hindsight, we might think it was, you know, an easy decision to make, but in the time, it must have been very hard.
Kurt:Yeah. It's true. It's hard to sometimes imagine ourselves into a different time that's as different as it is. It's easy to see the bad things in the past with the benefit of hindsight. Much harder to see the bad things going on right now in this moment.
Kurt:But it is possible, actually. We could try harder. We could open our eyes and do that and try to be a voice for the good. Perhaps taking some of Doctor. Davison's example as an inspiration for that.
Mary:And to do that, you're putting yourself at risk sometimes of being uncomfortable. What should people in your position who maybe are therapists or in the field be doing to make sure that we're not causing any harm?
Kurt:Well, I think, you know, listening to people with lived experience is the first and foremost thing. And I think thinking about our ethical principles and taking them really seriously, including this idea about what ought we to be doing. What are the aims of therapy and how do we know when we're attending to the best version of that and when we're maybe complicit in something that is really not so great. There's been a lot of that in the history of mental health, in the history of medicine. History generally isn't, you know, hasn't been great for folks with marginalized identities, LGBTQ identities in that many times and places over history.
Kurt:So there's lots and lots and lots of work to be done and lots of ways to be an ally, I think, and even when there are dark times.
Mary:And like we touched upon, these conversion practices aren't just a relic of history, unfortunately. They're still happening today.
Kurt:They're still happening today. I know. Isn't that it's it's shocking to think that that's true, but it is. We're going to talk more in upcoming episodes about some of the historical practices in psychotherapy and mental health that are highly problematic and other ways that we can try to reckon with that history. And we do look forward to having those sometimes difficult conversations.
Mary:They're necessary. Right?
Kurt:They're necessary.
Mary:And we encourage you to head to the show notes if you'd like to learn more about, doctor Davidson's work, and we'll include a link to, that documentary that, profiles him as well.
Kurt:Absolutely. There's a lot of really good interesting information about him and his work and about these issues in a general way, and, we will put some resources for folks that perhaps are, need to get out of an experience that they're having right now. The Trevor Project is a wonderful one, and, and we just we see you, you're out there, and and we appreciate you.
Mary:We thank you so much for being with us and look forward to seeing you next time.
Kurt:Unraveling is brought to you by Brattleboro Retreat. Our producers at Charts and Leisure are Andrew Adkin, Hans Beuteau, 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.