Background: Due to a combination of thin-slice judgments, ableism, bias, and a focus on allistic (non-autistic) dispositional standards, autistic people may experience admission issues and retention problems in mental health professional fields at higher rates than allistic people.

Method: To better understand their training and gatekeeping experiences, we interviewed 10 autistic mental health professionals and trainees from a variety of mental health professional programs (e.g., counseling psychology, clinical psychology, counseling, and social work). Utilizing reflexive thematic analysis, we generated three themes across our 11 semi-structured interview questions.

Results: Our generated themes included ableism (systemic and interpersonal), personal toll (cognitive load and emotional toll), and protective factors (internal and external). Our understanding of our interrelated themes is informed by both double empathy theory and the minority stress model. Participants in our study also regularly discussed a need for better autistic mentorship.

Discussion: We discuss recommendations for training program advocacy and neurodiversity-affirming practices. Based on our participant answers to strength-based and support-oriented questions, we offer suggestions for autistic mental health graduate trainees.

We sought to understand how the mental state of religious queer individuals is affected by religious marginalization and queer identity. Using a multi-method approach, we analyzed data from 626 participants to assess how a queer status affected psychological distress and life satisfaction, the mediating effect of strength of faith on the relationship between the queer status and life satisfaction, and the moderating effect of experiences with marginalization on the relationship between the strength of faith, psychological distress, and life satisfaction. Queer status was found to have a significant impact on queer individuals’ psychological wellness and life satisfaction. Marginalization experiences decreased psychological wellness and life satisfaction. Our qualitative analyses add to these results, describing the weaponization of queer identity in religious settings. These results can be attributed to the strong main effects of queer status and strength of faith on psychological distress and life satisfaction rather than tertiary variables.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a marked influence on the nature of psychotherapy in the transition from predominantly in-person services to predominantly remote, telemental health services, to an intermediary hybrid model. Increased availability of telehealth services has been denoted a point of equity in meeting service needs of diverse groups of people across the United States. However, some University and College Counseling Centers (UCCCs) have rapidly rolled back telemental health provisions in favor of in-person or hybrid models of practice, even amidst increased use of counseling services, pressure to expand service availability, and difficulties with clinical staff retention. To explore this phenomenon, 75 UCCC administrators in the U.S. were surveyed to elucidate the nature of remote staffing in UCCCs, including administrative perspectives regarding barriers to hiring permanently remote staff (PRS). Five thematic barriers to hiring PRS were identified: Institutional Roadblocks, Team Ethos, Equity in Clinical Duties, Student Demand, and Service Quality Concerns. A majority of these barriers coded into categories that were chronic and autonomy-limiting in nature. Implications and recommendations for UCCCs and college student wellness are discussed.

The Branch Davidians are a religious sect that emerged from the Seventh-day Adventist Church, known for their apocalyptic beliefs and practices. Originating in the 1950s, the group gained international notoriety in 1993 under the leadership of David Koresh due to a deadly siege at their Waco, Texas, compound by federal agents, highlighting issues of religious freedom and government overreach.

Satanism is a diverse collection of religious, philosophical, political, and cultural movements significantly impacted in antiquity and modernity by broader cultural mores.

The Satanic Temple is a nonsupernaturalist, nontheistic religion headquartered out of Salem, Maine, USA, that advocates for freedom of religious expression.

While religious diversity may be becoming increasingly more tolerated in developed countries, atheists are often still thought of as immoral and untrustworthy due to their lack of belief in a higher power. Complex historical, psychological, and sociological factors facilitate the moral distrust of atheists and atheism.