Lauren Canonico is the Founding Clinical Director and Psychotherapist at Affirmative Therapy Collective, an LGBTQIA+/GSM affirming psychotherapy practice, providing modern, engaging mental health treatment grounded in body, fat and sex positivity with social justice principles of intersectional feminism, queer theory, anti-racism and the Health at Every Size® approach at the core of their work.
What makes the work at Affirmative Therapy Collective unique in advancing LGBTQ health and equity?
At ATC, we consider cultural competence and LGBTQ+ competence to be the floor, not the ceiling. It is a living breathing practice that never stops and requires continuous engagement with training and self exploration.
We understand that our goal of providing high quality health and mental health care for LGBTQ+ folks means ensuring we are providing quality care for ALL LGBTQ+ folks in all parts of their experiences.
We do this by emphasizing intersectional values, with one of our unique cornerstones being a Health at Every Size approach to health care and mental health care that empowers patients to define health for themselves, and move toward it or not, in the ways they find most resonant. The HAES approach also centers the notion that our current concept of health and mental health is a sociopolitical construct that we must examine, along with its roots in anti-Black racism, anti-fatness, and ableism that upholds some bodies and experiences as being more deserving of care than others. We want queer and trans folks of all sizes and all lived experiences to be able to access trauma and eating disorder treatment and mental health care more broadly, including gender affirmative care.
What lessons or qualities should future doctors and healthcare leaders develop if they want to provide more inclusive care?
As therapists, particularly trauma and eating disorder therapists, we too often hear from our patients about traumatizing experiences with medical providers, which have far reaching implications on their desire to initiate and re-initiate care, and seek out preventative care. There are various skills that we utilize within the professional therapeutic space that lend themselves to more inclusive approaches to care. This includes active listening, which, when directed inward, can be an important element of self reflection.
Active listening is an incredible skill for health care professionals, and arguably one that is often missing in medical settings. This is even more important for those who want to work with LGBTQ+ folks, given the sensitive nature of health issues specifically pertaining to queer identities, the importance of sensitivity and inclusive efforts around language to signal safety (and actually be a safe-enough person), and awareness of the ways in which patients’ environments impact their safety and therefore their health.
While active listening is a cornerstone of responsive and competent care, it ultimately allows us as individuals and professionals to critically self reflect, which is yet another absolute necessity for future doctors and health care leaders. We are all raised in a society that privileges some bodies and some experiences over others as being worthy of care. This means that we all have unlearning to do around our biases and how they impact how we treat our patients, how we listen to our patients, and the meanings we make of what we’ve heard. Ultimately, reflecting on these aspects of positionality, approach, and cultural differences is all in service of providing more culturally responsive care.
Lastly, as therapists, a part of our ongoing education is engaging in supervision, where we talk about our patients, and our experiences of them, with a trusted colleague, usually someone more senior in our areas of specialization or approaches, in part to make sure that we are providing the kind of care we intend to and can minimize unintentional harm to our patient relationships. Invest heavily in what pieces of this are available to you through your training and career (grand rounds come to mind), and prioritize finding more tailored mentorship where you can. It is truly invaluable to your patients.
We know that most health care providers and leaders are here because they want to help others. But too few prioritize openness to how they can cause harm, and to the blind spots that we all carry that make harm an inevitability rather than unthinkable. Research backs this, from studies on patient - therapist relationships to studies correlating patient experience with patient outcome. How patients feel getting their care matters. Our efforts to be inclusive and create greater safety for LGBTQ+ folks within a system that has traditionally been unsafe matters tremendously.
Inspira Advantage is proud to interview experts like Lauren Canonico to help pre-med students understand the importance of culturally responsive care and inclusive support for diverse communities.
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