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Our goal is to improve mental health equity for youth.

At Affirm Lab, we explore how stigma (e.g., transphobia, racism, sexism) creates and sustains mental health inequities for marginalized youth. Currently, we're developing training interventions to reduce transphobia in mental healthcare and in schools.

Gender-Affirming Psychotherapy

Transgender youth face severe mental health disparities compared to their cisgender peers, and they often struggle to find providers who can meet their unique needs. While research shows that many providers want to help, they lack the skills and resources to provide affirming care.

We developed and piloted an online self-paced training intervention to teach gender-affirming psychotherapy to mental health providers (e.g., psychotherapists, social workers). 

What is Gender-Affirming Psychotherapy?

Gender-affirming psychotherapy is a set of evidence-based best practices for any mental health provider working with transgender clients. Practices include language to use and avoid, helping patients access other resources, and helping parents be supportive.

Our Findings:

1

We developed a list of principles (ideas that help guide best practice) and skills (behaviors to use or avoid) that are key to gender-affirming psychotherapy, based on research and lived experience. See Box 1 of our recent publication for the full list.

2

Our training works. Providers who were trained in Gender-Affirming Psychotherapy use the practices and show significant improvements in knowledge, attitudes, and confidence. To learn more about our pilot findings, see Dr. Price's NIH presentation materials below:

Targeting multilevel transphobia through a multilevel intervention

NIH Workshop: Promoting Mental Health for Sexual and Gender Minority Youth

Want to be trained?

Publications

* = mentee or student-author

Listed in reverse chronological order

Gender Affirming Psychotherapy (GAP): Core principles and skills to reduce the mental healthcare "gap" for transgender youth

Price, M.A., Rakhilin, M.*, Johansen, K.*, Collins, E.*, Pachankis, J.E., Lyon, A.R., Allen, M. (2024)

Employing dissemination and implementation science to promote mental health equity for transgender youth.

Price, M.A., Barnett, M. L., Cerezo, A., Broder-Fingert, S., & Matsuno, E. (2024)

Transgender-specific adolescent mental health provider availability is lower in states with more restrictive policies.

Hollinsaid, N. L.*, Price, M. A., & Hatzenbuehler, M. L. (2022)

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