Dr. Matt Salmon

Dr. Matt Salmon understands conversion therapy from two vantage points that rarely sit in the same person. He is a psychiatrist in the Washington, DC area who specializes in LGBTQ+ mental health and has treated many survivors of the practice. He is also a survivor himself.

He grew up in a devout Mormon household in Arizona, the son of a Republican congressman, and by his own account he arrived at conversion therapy already primed for it. "I was also raised in a devout Mormon household with religious OCD," he says. "I prayed and read scriptures compulsively, desperately trying to prove my worthiness to God. That desperation made me the perfect target for conversion therapy's lies."

Today he channels that history into his work, treating young people whose faith and mental health were used against them the way his were. His testimony is unusual because he can name, in clinical terms, exactly what conversion therapy does to a person and to the people who love them, and then tell you he has felt every bit of it himself.

Snapshot of This True Story:

• Dr. Matt Salmon is a psychiatrist in the Washington, DC area who focuses on LGBTQ+ mental health and treats survivors of conversion therapy. He is also a survivor of it.

• He grew up in a devout Mormon household in Arizona, the son of a Republican congressman, and describes struggling with religious OCD as a child.

• He says his compulsive effort to prove his worthiness to God made him "the perfect target," and he sees the same weaponized vulnerability in the patients he treats.

• Conversion therapy, he says, installed a belief that he was broken and would never be enough, a voice he has come to accept may never fully leave.

• In his account, the harm did not stop with him. It reached his parents, friends, and faith community, who came to experience his healing as a kind of loss.

• The practice blamed his parents for his being "broken," which bred years of resentment, even as, in his telling, they were part of what was breaking him.

• He now helps other survivors and offers his own life as evidence that healing, though hard and incomplete, is real.

"The Perfect Target": How Faith and Illness Were Weaponized

Conversion therapy works by exploiting the things a young person holds most tightly. For Dr. Salmon, those things were his faith and his mental health, and he is precise about how they were turned against him.

"I prayed and read scriptures compulsively, desperately trying to prove my worthiness to God," he says. "That desperation made me the perfect target for conversion therapy's lies." He now recognizes it in his practice. "I see that same vulnerability in survivors I treat now, people whose faith and mental illness were weaponized against them."

This is the part parents most need to understand about how the practice works. It does not present itself as an attack. It presents itself as a way to become worthy, which is exactly why a devout, anxious, sincere child is the easiest person to draw in. And it has no basis in science: every major health authority that has studied it has found it unsupported by evidence and harmful.

The Belief They Install: Broken, and Never Enough

Ask Dr. Salmon what conversion therapy actually left behind, and he does not describe a technique. He describes a sentence that got written into him.

"They installed in me the belief that I was broken, I needed fixing, and that unless I did the work to fix what they said was broken, I would never be enough."

He is a psychiatrist who has spent years in his own treatment, and he is honest about the limits of recovery. "Despite years of therapy, I've had to accept that voice will likely always exist within me." That candor matters, because it cuts against the promise every program makes, that the damage is temporary and fixable. The research agrees with him rather than with the programs: conversion efforts are tied to lasting depression, anxiety, trauma, and roughly double the odds of a lifetime suicide attempt.

There is a cruel second injury he sees constantly in his patients. The very thing that could help them heal is the thing they now fear. "I've seen how much it impacts their willingness to seek out the type of therapy that can heal them," he says, "because therapy is what harmed them in the first place." A practice that calls itself therapy can poison a survivor's trust in the real thing for years.

A Wound That Touches Everyone Who Loves You

The harm of conversion therapy is often framed as something that happens to one person. Dr. Salmon insists it is bigger than that, and he describes a dynamic that is rarely named out loud.

"Conversion therapy doesn't just harm the survivor," he says. "It wounds everyone who loves them. Your parents, your friends, and your faith community end up grieving two things at once: the distance that forms between you, and the relationships that could have been."

The cruelest turn, in his account, is what happens when a survivor finally gets better. "When I finally accepted myself and left, my family, friends, and faith community couldn't see my healing because of the lies conversion therapy had planted. They experienced it as betrayal." The people meant to be a safe harbor could not recognize his recovery as recovery. "They experience your healing as a kind of loss," he says, "though most can never articulate why."

He also names the blame the practice assigns, a feature survivors describe again and again. "Conversion therapy asserted that my parents were to blame for me being broken," he says, "all the while, they were the ones subtly breaking me. And that caused me to resent my parents for years." That pattern of pinning a child's identity on the family damages the very relationships a young person needs most, and researchers have found that high family rejection is among the strongest predictors of later suicide risk.

What a Psychiatrist Sees in the Survivors He Treats

Because Dr. Salmon lives on both sides of this, his clinical observations carry unusual weight. The pattern he lived is the pattern he now watches walk into his office.

He sees vulnerability that was weaponized, patients whose devotion and diagnoses were used as leverage. He sees the reluctance to trust treatment, because treatment is where the harm began. And he sees the way a survivor's own circle can keep the wound open. "The people who should have been their anchor end up reinforcing the shame conversion therapy installed," he says. "They become proof that something is still wrong."

That last observation is the one for families to sit with. When a child emerges from conversion therapy and a parent still treats them as broken, the parent unknowingly confirms the program's central lie. The documented harms of the practice are not only what happens inside the sessions. They are what the surrounding relationships do afterward, which is why medical authorities reject it and why what comes next at home matters so much.

Toward Healing

Dr. Salmon's story does not end in tidy resolution, and he would be the first to say so. The installed voice may never fully disappear. But he has built a life and a vocation on the other side of the harm.

He is a practicing psychiatrist, an advocate, and the author of a book, Pride & Prejudice: Healing Division in the Modern Family, about repairing the fractures that conversion therapy and rejection leave behind. He spends his days helping young people who arrive carrying the same sentence he carries, and showing them it does not have to be the last word.

For a parent of faith, that is the takeaway worth holding. The child in front of you can heal. Whether the people who love them help or hinder that healing is, in large part, a choice the family gets to make.

Key Lessons from Dr. Matt's Story for Parents

Devotion and mental illness can be turned into a trap. Dr. Salmon's compulsive faith and untreated OCD did not protect him; they made him the ideal target. Programs exploit a child's sincerity, not their rebellion.

The core lie is "you are broken and never enough." That is what conversion therapy installs, and it can outlast every session. A practice built on that message cannot make a child healthier.

The harm spreads to the whole family. Parents, friends, and faith communities grieve the distance the practice creates. The wound is shared, and it reverberates across time.

Blaming parents damages what a child needs most. Conversion therapy told Dr. Salmon his parents caused him, breeding years of resentment. Assigning that blame injures the relationships that could otherwise protect a young person.

When your child heals, believe them. Survivors often find their own circle cannot recognize their recovery and reads it as betrayal. Seeing healing as loss reinforces the shame. Choosing to see it as healing is one of the most powerful things a parent can do.

Share Your Own Story

If this account resonated with you and you'd like to share your story, please feel free to share your own experiences surrounding conversion therapy in any capacity. We look forward to hearing your story.