Conversion Therapy Linked To Trans Suicide Attempts

NBC News reports:

Exposure to “conversion therapy” — efforts by a secular or religious professional to change a transgender person’s gender identity — is associated with thoughts of and attempts at suicide, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry. Dr. Jack Turban, the study’s lead author and a resident physician in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, said it was the first study “to show that gender identity conversion efforts are associated with adverse mental health outcomes, including suicide attempts.”

Turban said that previous reports showing the negative effects of conversion therapy, also known as “ex-gay therapy” or “reparative therapy,” have focused on efforts to change a person’s sexual orientation. But this was novel, he said, because of its large sample size — over 27,000 transgender people responded to the survey — and its broad approach to identifying past efforts to change participants’ gender identity.

Those who were subjected to the controversial practice before age 10 were four times more likely to report lifetime suicide attempts than the general transgender population, according to the findings.
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— NBC Out (@NBCOUT) September 11, 2019