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.

  • Flying Squid
    18•9 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•9 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.