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
    2•5 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.

    • @EldritchFeminity
      3•5 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.