Hello everyone!
My name is Blayne Becker, and I’m a rising senior with a major in Psychology and a minor in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. I am so excited to conduct research this summer with the help of the Frederick Honors College as well as my faculty mentor, Dr. Julie Beaulieu. Research is a somewhat new interest with me, and previously I have only explored it in a laboratory setting. I am eager to conduct independent research over the next few months and learn more about a topic that is important to me.
I am going to use the next few months as an opportunity to review the history of the LGBTQ+ community and the treatment mental health care that this community receives. We live in a time where structural oppression and anti-LGBTQ+ bias affects the lives of millions of people. Because of this, it can be difficult for people in the LGBTQ+ community to get proper health care, especially mental health care. It can be such a struggle for anyone seeking out mental health care to find a practitioner that they feel comfortable with, and this struggle is only worsened for those who have an LGBTQ+ identity.
People in this community have a much higher rate of self-destructive behaviors when compared to those not in the community. Due to this, mental health care is especially important for the LGBTQ+ community, but many practitioners are ill-equipped to handle issues that are unique to this group of people. In order to make a difference in the way people in the LGBTQ+ community receive care, research is needed to discover the fundamentals of why this descrepancy exists, and how the field has changed over time. Education is required to change the standards in mental health care for the LGBTQ+ community, but there is a gap in research on the topic due to the long history of hardships that this community has had to face. I hope to bridge that gap this summer.
One of the main reasons why I am excited to be participating in the Brackenridge Fellowship is because it will give me an opportunity to explore my interests and help me decide what I want to do once I graduate. I’m sure many of my peers can relate when I say that it’s difficult and scary to think about what you want to do for the rest of your life. Like I said previously, research is a new interest for me. Because of that, I’m unsure if I would like to make this into a career, so I’m extremely grateful to be given the chance to delve more into my interest with this fellowship. Since all of my research experience has been with a team in the past, I’m eager to see how it differs from the independent research I will be conducting. I’m also excited to learn more about research as a whole. The weekly meetings will be so useful for me to understand how research is done across all disciplines. The process as a whole has always intrigued me, so having the chance to learn more about it this summer is something I’m especially grateful for.