Chapter 6 - Working inclusively with gender and sexual diversity

Stonewall, one of the largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) charities in the United Kingdom (UK), estimates that over half of LGBT people in Britain experience symptoms of depression, with around half of transgender people, and over a third of nontransgender lesbian, gay, and bisexual people reporting they had thoughts about suicide or self-harm within the year prior (Bachmann and Gooch, 2018a). A further 13% of young LGBT people aged 18–24 also reported that they had intended to take their own lives in the past 12 months (Bradlow et al., 2020). Yet, people with gender and sexual differences are thought to experience disproportionately lower outcomes in psychotherapy within mainstream psychological services such as the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme (Foy et al., 2019; Moller et al., 2019; Rimes et al., 2018, Rimes et al., 2019).