Recent Improvement in Mental Health Services to Lesbian and Gay Clients

Recent attention to the needs of gay and lesbian clients in the professional literature and by mental health training programs should be resulting in improved mental health services to this population. Gay and lesbian clients in this study did report greater satisfaction with therapy experiences in more recent years (r = .47), and they reported more improvement in services over time than did heterosexual clients (r = .23). Gay and lesbian clients' retrospective ratings of non-gay therapists before 1985 were closer to "not at all helpful" than to "fairly helpful." By the late 1980s, however, these ratings were rising sharply, surpassing heterosexuals' ratings of their therapists in the 1990s.