Government Bans on Conversion Therapy

'Conversion therapy' refers to a widely discredited set of medical practices that attempt to change a person's sexual orientation or gender identity. It is estimated that up to ten percent of sexual minorities will have been exposed to these practices at some point in their lifetime, and such exposure is strongly associated with adverse mental health outcomes and suicidality.

These conversion practices are systematically targeted at sexual and gender minorities, making them particularly vulnerable to unequal targeting by providers of such practices and to the potential adverse effects.

Governments are increasingly moving to ban these 'conversion therapy' practices, but such bans have not been rigorously evaluated. Moreover, there is concern that such bans are difficult to enforce, with some providers still delivering the same practices but under different names. Thus, we do not know how conversion therapy bans are implemented 'on the ground', nor do we know whether they meaningfully improve sexual minority health outcomes.

Vanderbilt's Approach:

Center Director Kitt Carpenter, Professor of Economics, is collaborating with social and psychiatric epidemiologist Kirsty Clark, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Health, and Society and implementation scientist Carolyn Audet, Assistant Professor of Health Policy in the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine to understand whether, how, and to what extent these bans on sexual orientation change efforts are implemented and enforced in order to estimate their effects on mental health and substance use among sexual minority populations.

The team will use both quasi-experimental causal inference methods on big data from survey and administrative sources as well as a systematic mixed-methods approach with stakeholder interviews of conversion therapy survivors, mental health providers, lawmakers, and advocates. This research project would be incomplete without expertise from economics, mental health, and implementation science, highlighting the importance of radical collaboration to address an important inequality-related health problem.