Some mental health experts are advocating for religious trauma to be considered an official disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Some mental health experts are advocating for religious trauma to be considered an official disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Kellen Swift-Godzisz, 35, said he doesn’t go on dates, struggles with erectile dysfunction and is hesitant to trust people. For more than 20 years, he’s experienced intense bouts of anxiety and depression that have had a “major hold on his life.”

“Imagine being told by everyone you trusted that you’re going to hell because you like men,” Swift-Godzisz, a marketing project manager living in Chicago, told NBC News.

At just 11 years old, Swift-Godzisz recalled, he would sit in his bedroom every night praying or writing letters that said, “Please God, remove my affliction of same-sex attraction,” and would then store each letter in an overflowing shoebox in his closet.

  • Lath
    8•10 months ago

    Are you unable to take into consideration the idea that the religious staff didn’t need special camps in order to assault children? That they could and did do it on church grounds or even in the victims own homes?

    • Flying Squid
      1•10 months ago

      Do you really not understand the difference between taking a child to a church where they may possibly be assaulted and forcing a child to be sexually tortured? Really?

      • Lath
        10•10 months ago

        Dear cephalopod, you’re too focused on comparing who gets harmed the most. It’s not a contest. None should be harmed at all.
        The division is unhealthy.

        • Flying Squid
          18•10 months ago

          You cannot make it any more illegal to sexually abuse children in church than it already is. Conversion therapy is legal in a majority of U.S. states. It is legal sexual abuse. That’s a huge difference.

          • Lath
            2•10 months ago

            Converting “deviant behaviours” was a mainstay of psychological practices up until recently. It wasn’t limited to sexual identity. Anyone who didn’t conform to social norms of so-called ‘morals’ and religious background was subjected to this kind of torture, one of its more famous victims being a daughter of the Kennedy family.

            There is no legal sexual abuse. There is lack of information, lack of evidence or complicit corruption. Any judge that respects the spirit of law will treat abuse as such when presented to them.

            Yet if by chance, any abuse is legal then you are also allowed to perform it on those who practice it on others. I recommend you do so if there is such a situation.

        • @[email protected]
          5•10 months ago

          The irony of the person who came into a post specifically about the trauma that religion causes LGBTQ people and tried to make it about other people saying this is too unreal.

          Pot, have you met kettle?

          • Lath
            1•10 months ago

            I didn’t try to make it about other people. Being a victim of religion is not an exclusive membership. Or are you proud of being an abuser’s favoured one and I’m threatening that position?
            If so, then I apologize. Please, segregate yourself. Stand out. Be different from any other victim.

            My bad.

            • @[email protected]
              3•10 months ago

              Yes, you did. When speaking about a specific group being affected by something, we don’t have to talk about every group affected by the same thing. To not do so isn’t ignoring them or segregation or whatever, or else every time you talk about starving children in the US, you have to mention all the starving children in every other country as well. Nobody here or in the article said anything about how straight kids aren’t harmed by religion.

              This is just “I am uncomfortable when the conversation isn’t about me” because you aren’t included in a conversation about LGBTQ experiences.