Making mental health more approachable

After four years with Room For Change, Brian Kennedy is leaving that agency to work as an independent therapist focusing on LGBTQ+ clients. He is also establishing the Kennedy Center for Mental Health Advocacy and Education to make therapy more approachable

DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
Taffet@DallasVoice.com

After spending four years as a counselor at Room for Change, Brian Kennedy is embarking on a new venture as an independent therapist with 53 Christopher Counseling & Psychotherapy. On top of that, he is establishing the Kennedy Center for Mental Health Advocacy and Education.

And, he assured us, his new organization is not the Trump-Kennedy Center.

Reset
“Going to a new space gives me a reset,” Kennedy said of his decision to go independent.

Room for Change, he explained, has a different, statewide focus. But as he has gained experience as a counselor, his interest has become more centered on care for the LGBTQ+ community.

Over the last several years, Kennedy has become a speaker and a trainer for other LGBTQ+ counselors. He wants to do more writing, and he’s launching a new podcast called Psycho Sexual. In the future, he said, he’d like to host a Dallas queer sex and relationships conference.

All of those pieces add up to Kennedy’s main goal — to get people to start having those mental health conversations.

In his former position at Room For Change, “I was seeing 38 clients a week,” he said. “After seeing so many people, I just didn’t have the bandwidth for it. I was exhausted. When I sat down to write, I couldn’t get past the exhaustion.”

That doesn’t mean he won’t be seeing clients. He expects some to follow him, and new clients are welcome to schedule appointments.

“My job in therapy is to work my way out of a job,” he said.

In his final appointment with each of his clients this past week, he found some were ready to move forward on their own. Others, he found, might benefit from talking to someone else.

And some may move with him.

In his new practice, Kennedy said, he’d like to address all those things associated with growing up gay or lesbian or transgender or queer, and how HIV affects different people.

Many of those who lived through the AIDS crisis never completely grieved for friends and partners they lost. Many older members of the community suffer from survivor’s guilt over having lived while so many others died.

As a community, “the minute we had antiretrovirals, we moved on to gay marriage” without, perhaps, coming to terms with all of the emotional issues the AIDS pandemic created, he said.

In addition, so many younger people are exploring their gender identity that gender identity has become its own specialty within the counseling field.

Many LGBTQ+ people come from religious backgrounds, with families that reject them and even send them for “reparative” therapy to learn from other gays how to not be gay anymore. Reparative therapy doesn’t work, and it has caused all kinds of self-hatred and other mental harm in those who have been subjected to it.

So, Kennedy said, he wants to offer courses to train other therapists on helping people suffering in the aftermath of “reparative therapy.”

While his focus, he said, is always on helping the LGBTQ+ community, Kennedy said his ideal goal is “being the person I needed when I was younger.”

Before persons can reveal themselves, they must feel safe, Kennedy explained, “or the client will withhold and not get the help they need.” So his goal, he continued, is to make therapy less terrifying.

“If it means I need to do a podcast, I’ll do a podcast,” Kennedy said.

And he’d like to work with Prism Health and Resource Center and Legacy Cares, all of which do counseling. (He noted that SMU now has an LGBTQ+ track in its program for educating future counselors, thanks largely to the fact that the school teamed with Resource Center to provide counseling in the community.)

Prism and Legacy Cares and Resource Center “each do so much in the community,” Kennedy said. “I have so much respect for all they do.”

But, he added, because those agencies are each working with so many clients, they can’t give it the same laser-driven focus, Kennedy said.

The closet
“None of us came out until we felt emotional safety,” Kennedy said. “But we’re told if you’re out, you need to be out to everyone.”

But Kennedy doesn’t believe that, nor does he encourage his clients to come out to anyone unless they’re ready to come out and can come out safely.

Instead, he believes the rest of the world needs to earn their way in.

“If you make homophobic jokes, you don’t earn my confidence to come out to you,” he said.

If coming out means losing your job, especially a job you want to keep, then don’t come out.

And the reason more people are conflicted about coming out is based in what they have been taught by religion. The simple answer is to attend a church, synagogue, temple or other religious institution that affirms you, Kennedy said. But, he noted, that often involved rejecting family, neighbors and friends.

Kennedy said at a talk he gave at UT Southwestern last year, coming out came up. The group didn’t see coming out as that important an issue until he turned it around.

He posed a question to the group: “We live in a heteronormative society. What if I assumed all of you were queer.” And with that, he made those counselors he was talking to think for the first time about what it would be like if they had to come out as cisgender and straight every time they met someone.

Opening Monday
Kennedy said 53 Christopher will be open to see clients on Monday, Aug. 3. Four therapists will be on hand, with room in their new office for expansion.

He plans to begin operating the Kennedy Center at the same time, and he said he hopes to have one community event scheduled each month.

But even though he is leaving Room for Change to start his own practice, Kennedy had only good things to say about his former employer.

“Over the past year, I’ve spent a great deal of time reflecting on what’s next — both personally and professionally,” he wrote on Facebook. “Room for Change has been a home for the past four years and has allowed me to grow in ways I could never imagine.”

His biggest concern, he said, is “Who still isn’t being reached?” And what are the barriers to accessing care?

So he’s looking for ways to bring mental health “out of the therapy office and into the community in meaningful, approachable ways.”

“I want to create spaces where people can ask questions without judgment, better understand their mental health, and feel empowered to seek support long before they’re in crisis,” he pledged.

53 Christopher opens on Monday, Aug. 3 and is located at 1825 Market Center Blvd. Brian Kennedy offers therapy for individuals and couples.