Anne Williams-Isom, FCLC ’86, the deputy mayor for health and human services in New York City and the James R. Dumpson Chair in Child Welfare Studies at Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service, served as the moderator of the panel, which featured Celia Fisher, Ph.D., the Marie Ward Doty University Chair in Ethics and founding director of Fordham’s Center for Ethics Education; Rev. Bryan N. Massingale, S.T.D., the James and Nancy Buckman Chair in Applied Christian Ethics at Fordham; and Professor Iftekhar Hasan, the E. Gerald Corrigan Chair in International Business and Finance at the Gabelli School of Business.

The panel, held on Oct. 11 at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, was a part of a weeklong series of events celebrating the inauguration of President Tania Tetlow as the 33rd president of Fordham. Tetlow, who gave the closing remarks at the event, said that discussions like this were part of why she decided to come to Fordham.

“Fordham has this incredible chance to matter; the reason I came here is because as the world feels like it’s coming apart at the seams, I wanted to be at the place that could make the most difference—not because we’re going to solve every world problem,” she said. “But because we are going to try.”

‘Hope Is Not Fantasy’

One of the biggest ways Fordham can address today’s challenges and inspire students to work on those challenges is by not ignoring “the bad stuff,” Massingale said.

“I think that we can move too easily to hope without looking at the bad stuff,” he said, highlighting that while issues such as ecological irresponsibility, attacks on voting rights, racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Asian hate have been around for a while, they’ve come racing back to the forefront in recent years.

“We’ve got to talk about the bad stuff, otherwise hope becomes escapism and fantasy, and hope is not fantasy,” he said. “I’m looking at all of these things—I think we have to be honest and ask ourselves, ‘How are we creating a student who’s able to take their place as a global citizen in the face of those challenges?’”

Hasan said that for students to become engaged with the global society, they have to learn how to weed out “the noise” that gets thrown at them on social media from important, factual information.

“The world has changed in such a way that the information that comes to the students—it used to be traditional newspapers, TV, and radio—and now it comes from the big technology, social media,” he said. “In a social sense, they need to prepare to sort between the noise and what is fact.”

Teaching Soft and Hard Skills

Williams-Isom said that she recalled a time when she was working as the executive officer of the anti-poverty organization Harlem Children’s Zone, and felt that the hard skills she brought to the job weren’t enough to address the challenges of poverty her organization was trying to solve.

“I have all these [skills]—I have a law degree—and I was like ‘I need something else,’” she said, adding that she decided to get a doctorate in ministry to help with the spirit and “soul part” of her job. “I felt like I had these hard skills, but if I didn’t have the ability to see some hope in a healing, radical love kind of way, I wasn’t really going to be prepared to do this work.”

Massingale said that Fordham has an opportunity to provide students with those “softer skills,” like critical reasoning and a desire to help those in need, that can help them face difficult situations.

“I think all too often we kind of apologize for a liberal education, saying that it’s not practical,” he said. “And what you just said is ‘yes, we can give skills, but skills are going to become outdated.’ What we need is something more—what’s going to keep you in this fight, especially when you don’t see how your skills are making any practical difference.”

Fisher said that one of the things that she tries to teach her students is “cultural and ethical humility.”

“How are we giving students that kind of tool?” said Fisher, whose Center for Ethics Education oversees Fordham’s master’s program in ethics and society. “As part of the Jesuit tradition, it’s an openness to others, as well as a desire and a need and understanding of self-reflection of our own biases, but also understanding that we cannot help people if we do not understand the social, political life that they’re living in.”

Fisher gave an example of students doing research and how they “can’t just be studying the individual, they have to be looking at the context in which the individual is engaged.”

Continued Growth and Improvement

Massingale said that the Jesuit values and ways of teaching, such as those that Fisher used to describe her students’ research, could be even more emphasized at Fordham.

“I think where we could do better is to think of something like the Jesuit universal apostolic preferences, where it talks about walking with the excluded, where it talks about walking with youth to give them a hope-filled future,” he said.

The panelists also called on the University to make sure it was continuously working to improve and address when “the fractured world” and its problems appear on campus, which was something that Tetlow reflected on in her closing remarks.

“I love the challenge to us, as an institution, to model our values and how we make those difficult choices…of how we collectively decide what kind of community we create and all the ways that we often fail in that regard, but forever strive to do better,” she said.

Learning From the Students

One way the University can make sure it does that is by listening to and learning from its students, Tetlow said.

“How we are willing to teach our students to question assumptions and challenge authority, knowing that they will turn that on us, and to be proud of them when they do it—even if it takes a minute,” she said.

Fisher said that this is something she’s taken to heart in her years of teaching.

“It’s very important that … we as professors indicate that we are open to learn, that we recognize that our life experience is not your life experience. What can you tell me? How can I help you? How can I connect you to others, whether it’s inside the University or outside, who can give you more than I can from that world perspective that we need,” Fisher said.

That message was echoed throughout, as the panel started with a video of eight students sharing their experiences about why they decided to go to Fordham.

“I came to Fordham Law to represent low-wage immigrant workers, particularly undocumented workers who have their wages stolen by bad employers,” Anthony Damelio, FCRH ’08, LAW ’22 said in the video. “Fordham Law gave me not only the tools necessary to become an excellent advocate for my clients, but it also stoked the flames of justice within me that are essential to lawyering for social change.

Williams-Isom emphasized the importance of centering the student voice.

“In some ways, we probably should always start with the student voice, because it keeps us grounded, and there certainly was a lot of hope there,” she said.

“Xiangyu’s research represents an innovative and methodologically rigorous approach to understanding how racially biased social media posts affect the mental health of Asian, African American, and Latinx youth,” said her mentor Celia B. Fisher, Ph.D., psychology professor and the Marie Ward Doty University Chair in Ethics. “Her study is especially important in light of the ubiquity of social media usage among adolescents.” 

Tao is a student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ applied developmental psychology program, from which she will earn both her master’s and doctoral degrees by 2024. Her research focuses on racial/ethnic discrimination and substance abuse, especially among people of color.

Focusing on BIPOC Teenagers 

Two years ago, she began working on her master’s thesis: an examination of the relationship between racial discrimination on social media—widely used by adolescents and young adults—and teenagers’ mental health. Instead of focusing on a largely white population, like many American health research studies, Tao wanted to focus on BIPOC (Black, indigenous, and people of color) teens—a historically underrepresented group in U.S. research studies.

“Existing research on social media use among adolescents mostly focuses on non-Hispanic white youth. But BIPOC adolescents have similar or higher rates of social media use, compared to their non-Hispanic white peers. The majority of them have also been exposed to social media racial discrimination, especially during the pandemic,” said Tao, an international student from China. “I want to explore the negative consequences of being exposed to such high levels of social media racial discrimination, particularly on mental health.” 

There are two types of social media racial discrimination: individual and vicarious, said Tao. Someone who experiences individual discrimination could receive a racist comment or direct message through social media. Vicarious discrimination is less direct, but still harmful, said Tao. That’s when someone sees news on social media about someone who was discriminated against—and the victim is the same race or ethnicity as the viewer. 

In a cross-sectional study, Tao explored how these types of racial discrimination collectively impact mental health. She surveyed more than 400 adolescents nationwide through an online platform, where they anonymously self-reported their social media usage, personal experiences with racial discrimination on social media, and their mental health. 

Navigating the Pros and Cons of Online Civic Engagement

In her research results, Tao confirmed that individual and vicarious social media discrimination are related to several mental health problems among BIPOC adolescents, including anxiety, depression, and alcohol use. But her “most interesting finding” presents a tricky conundrum, she said. 

“Adolescents who advocate for themselves through social media civic engagement are more likely to be exposed to racial discrimination online, which is associated with adverse mental health. At the same time, existing studies show that civic engagement in general is a good thing for youth development,” Tao said.

Tao said her research shows that there needs to be more intervention and prevention strategies implemented by not only psychologists, but also social media companies who can help prevent social media racial discrimination and improve the mental health of adolescents of color.   

Parents play a significant role in youth development, but their role in managing their children’s social media accounts isn’t easy, she added. 

“It’s a gray area. We don’t want to advocate for parents to prevent their children from using social media or participating in civic engagement online. Civic engagement, although associated with more racial discrimination, is still a good thing. We want BIPOC youth to participate in civic engagement because they can eventually develop policies that eliminate racial injustice in this country,” Tao said. “I think parents should be their children’s allies and supporters. They should encourage their children’s civic engagement and always be there for them.”

When Tao starts her doctoral dissertation next semester at Fordham, she plans to narrow her focus to one or two ethnicities. In addition, she aims to analyze the language of teenagers’ actual race-related posts in their social media accounts. This will provide more detailed and objective research results, she said.   

“Youth mental health is the foundation of our society,” said Tao, whose goal is to become a professor and researcher who studies social media usage and mental health among BIPOC adolescents and young adults. “We want our future generations to be healthy—both physically and mentally.” 

Celia Fisher, Ph.D., knew she was onto something in 1997 when she asked Joseph M. McShane S.J., president of Fordham who was then dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, to fund a series of faculty seminars around the topic of ethics. In 1999, the success of those seminars led to the creation of the Center for Ethics Education.

Twenty years later, Fisher, the Marie Ward Doty University Chair in Ethics, says she’s still amazed at what the center has accomplished. The center, which received initial funding from the National Institute of Health and Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, currently oversees educational programs on the undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate level. It has produced over 200 publications and has received a total of $11 million to conduct research supporting the rights and welfare of vulnerable populations. For the past eight years, it has also administered the HIV and Drug Abuse Prevention Research Ethics Training Institute.

Interdisciplinary From the Start

Fisher said one of the center’s greatest points of pride has been its interdisciplinary focus.

“The center’s success was built on the support, encouragement, and involvement of faculty of all the different schools and programs at Fordham,” she said.

“To be able to put all that together with the support of an interdisciplinary faculty, advisers, and teachers has been an incredibly wonderful experience.”

From the very beginning, Fisher, whose background is in psychology, has had two associate directors hailing from the theology and philosophy departments. Curran Center for Catholic Studies Director Christina Firer Hinze, Ph.D., represented theology when the Center for Ethics Education started and was followed by Barbara Andolsen. Currently, the position is held by theology professor Thomas Massaro, S.J.

Michael Baur, Ph.D., an associate professor of philosophy and adjunct professor of law, joined in 1999 as associate director and never left. It helps, he said, that he is “constitutionally built” to be interdisciplinary.

“For those who are predisposed to think beyond boundaries, the center provides a huge playground of full opportunities to think creatively about different disciplines,” he said.

“The center has made it really easy for me to start conversations with people I never would have spoken with about economics, psychology, biology, and neurosciences.”

In 1999, Baur recalled, the goal of the center was to create a space for crossing boundaries to address ethics and being open to whatever came along as a result. The interdisciplinary minor in bioethics, which was first offered to undergraduates in 2013, is an example of how the center has evolved to meet the needs of students.

“We already had the goodwill and the communications among different faculty. We didn’t have to reinvent the wheel,” he said.

Debating Issues of the Times

When it comes to public programming, the center, which kicked off its 20th-anniversary celebration with a March 7 lecture titled “Ethics and the Digital Life,” has hosted events dedicated to nearly every thorny issue debated in the United States today.

Its first public event was an April 2000 workshop titled “The Ethics of Mentoring: Faculty and Student Obligations.” In a lecture four years later, Christian ethics professor Margaret Farley, Ph.D. weighed in on the use of human embryonic stem cells in research. The drug industry was the focus of a 2005 forum, “Bio-Pharmaceuticals and Public Trust,” and in 2012, the center co-sponsored “Money, Media and the Battle for Democracy’s Soul,” where former Senator Russ Feingold issued an ominous warning about the role of money in politics.

In 2013, a conference tackled the uncomfortable reality that the United States accounts for about 5 percent of the world’s population, but is home to nearly a quarter of the world’s prison population. Four years later, the center’s decision to co-sponsor “In Good Conscience: Human Rights in an Age of Terrorism, Violence and Limited Resources,” proved prescient, with the actual lecture coming two weeks after terrorist attacks in Brussels.

For Fisher, one of the most emotional events was “Moral Outrage and Moral Repair: Reflections on 9/11 and Its Afterlife,” a daylong conference co-organized with Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture in April 2011.

“It was so moving. We had clerics from all different religions, we had philosophers talking about forgiveness, all sides of it. We had survivors and families of survivors. It was such an emotional experience,” she said.

A Flexible Master’s Program

The center’s efforts are not confined to lectures and panels. In 2009, at the suggestion of former Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dean Nancy Busch Rossnagel, Ph.D., the center began offering a Master of Arts in ethics and society under the direction of Adam Fried, Ph.D, GSAS’ 13, 17. It is now overseen by Rimah Jaber, GSAS’ 16.

Yohan Garcia, GSAS ’18, one of the program’s 57 alumni, recently accepted a position as national formation coordinator for the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Pastoral Migratoria (Migration Ministry) program.

A native of Mexico who moved to the Belmont neighborhood in 2003, Garcia earned an undergraduate degree in political science from Hunter College in 2015. In 2013, he attended a spiritual retreat and realized he wanted to incorporate his faith into his studies. As a Fordham master’s student, he took classes such as Natural Law (at the Law School); Race, Gender and the Media; and Introduction to Thomas Aquinas. Today, he’s able to apply what he learned in each of those courses to his work around immigration.

Although he’s only just started his job in Chicago, he’s already considering applying to Ph.D. programs.

“When it comes to issues like immigration, there’s no easy solution,” he said.

“We all have a different idea of the common good, but at the end of the day, as a society, we have to work toward a common goal that will benefit all of us. Listening is a great skill and a gift to have when it comes to this issue.”

HIV Research Training

Faith Fletcher, Ph.D., an assistant professor of health behavior at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, completed training with the HIV and Drug Abuse Prevention Research Ethics Training Institute (RETI) in 2016. The institute, which is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, has to date provided over 42 early career professionals in the social, behavioral, medical, and public health fields with an opportunity to gain research ethics training.

A native of Thibodaux, Louisiana, who was one of the first students to pursue a bioethics minor as an undergraduate at Tuskegee University, she has focused on the ethics of engagement with African American women living with HIV.

“Before coming to the research ethics training institute, I had training in both bioethics and public health, but I really struggled with finding the academic spaces, and even the language to combine these disciplinary areas,” Fletcher said.

“The institute is definitely the highlight of my academic career.”

Because she works with marginalized populations, Fletcher said her biggest challenge is avoiding situations that jeopardize the safety of them or researchers. It’s a real issue, as researchers engaged in qualitative research sometimes conduct interviews in vehicles, bars, and other unorthodox places to make sure the people they are interviewing are not further stigmatized.

“What I’ve learned from the training is we have to rely on research participants as research ethics experts, because they have these daily experiences with stigma, and are skilled at navigating and circumventing stigma. These are the individuals we have to go to as we’re designing our research ethics protocols,” she said.

It’s humbling work, and Fletcher said the women she’s interviewed have taught her much about resiliency.

“I’ve learned so much about the way that they’re able to navigate through society despite high levels of stigma and stress, and the way they’ve coped with it, risen above it, and not allowed it to define them,” she said.

“I’m thankful for them allowing me into their spaces, because not only does it enhance my research, but I’ve grown personally from their stories.”

Protecting the rights and welfare of vulnerable populations has been a common theme running through the centers’ NIH-sponsored research. For instance, Fisher was the principal investigator on a 4-year series of studies designed to reduce the burden of HIV among young sexual and gender minority youth.  The results of one of these studies were published in the journal AIDS and Behavior.

In 2014, based on a project supported by the Fordham’s HIV, Research Ethics Institute, Cynthia Pearson, Ph.D., was awarded a grant, along with Fisher, to adapt a culturally specific ethics training course for American Indian and Alaska Natives populations. Fisher also led a study in 2006 to assess and develop procedures to enhance the capacity of adults with mild and moderate mental retardation to provide informed consent for therapeutic research; the results were published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

A Shared Dedication to Social Justice

Going forward, Fisher said she wants to expand the involvement of the faculty and alumni in center programming, recruit more international students, and establish a research center on health disparities among marginalized populations.

Since its beginnings, the Center has been grounded in Fordham University’s commitment to intellectual excellence, human dignity, and the common good. The success of the center, she said, is due in no small part to the breadth and depth of Fordham’s faculty dedication to these ideals.

“Faculty, students, and administrators share this dedication to social justice and helping others that just implicitly supports what we’re doing. So, when we reach out to faculty, they are already providing students with the tools for critical and compassionate engagement in creating a just world,” she said.

“They may not do work in ethics per se, but the way they think, because they’re at Fordham, they are committed to caring for the least among us.”

The University Research Council presented the Outstanding Externally Funded Research Awards (OEFRA) to recognize the high quality and impact of sponsored research within the last three years and its enhancement of Fordham’s reputation—both nationally and globally.

Honorees in five separate categories included:

Sciences: Silvia C. Finnemann, Ph.D., professor of biology

Since joining Fordham University in 2008, Finnemann has secured over $3.65 million in grants from the National Institute of Health, the Beckman Initiative for Macular Research and the Retinal Stem Cell Consortium of New York State for her research on healthy eye function and age-related changes to eye cell function. These grants enable her to support a thriving laboratory where she has a team of graduate and undergraduate students and post-doctoral researchers.

Social Sciences: Celia B. Fisher, Ph.D., The Marie Ward Doty University Chair in Ethics and professor of psychology

Fisher has earned 12 major research awards and over $11 million from federal agencies over the past 20 years for her work in HIV and substance abuse prevention and research ethics. Recent awards have come from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.

Humanities: Stephen R. Grimm, Ph.D., professor of philosophy

Grimm was awarded $4.5 million by the John Templeton Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation to lead a three-year interdisciplinary initiative called “Varieties of Understanding: New Perspectives from Psychology, Philosophy, and Theology.” His grant is the largest externally funded research award in the humanities in Fordham’s history.

Interdisciplinary Research: Jennifer L. Gordon, professor of law

With grants from the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundation, Gordon pursued a three-year initiative to combat abuse and trafficking of Mexican migrant workers recruited to work in the United States. Partnering with the Mexican human rights organization ProDESC, she has developed a transnational pilot program set to launch this year to implement recommendations that have arisen from her research.

Junior Faculty Research: Marc N. Conte, Ph.D., assistant professor of economics

Conte received nearly $500,000 from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, a division of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. In collaboration with a researcher from the University of Nebraska, he is using the grant to study how behavioral economics can improve auctions that induce farmers to set aside land for conservation and biodiversity.

In opening the ceremony, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, lauded the honorees for the fearless inquiry of their academic research, particularly at a time when truth and wisdom are being devalued in our society.

“Research is at the center of the academic enterprise,” he said, “enriching not only the Fordham community, but the community of the United States and of the world.”

Organized by the Office of Research and the University Research Council and sponsored by the Bronx Science Consortium, the daylong event also included grant education workshops, a forum of university researchers, and a keynote address by Dr. Walter L. Goldschmidts, Ph.D., vice president and executive director of the Office of Sponsored Programs at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

-Nina Heidig

In the aftermath, however, it is crucial that the global community avoids acting on xenophobic fear and instead prioritizes the protection of human rights—the most ethical and effective response to ensure global peace and stability.

The panel consisted of a Rwandan genocide survivor, the UN assistant secretary-general for human rights, a Columbia law professor, and a Fordham ethicist, all of whom weighed in on subjects including terrorism, torture, and capital punishment at a discussion, “In Good Conscience: Human Rights in an Age of Terrorism, Violence, and Limited Resources.”

“Human rights abuses like genocide don’t happen overnight,” said Consolee Nishimwe, a human rights activist whose family was murdered during the Rwandan genocide. “It [first involves]a systematic discrimination of a particular minority group or groups within a society with the encouragement or participation of the government or authorities.”

The global spike in human rights abuses is alarming, said Ivan Šimonović, PhD, the UN assistant secretary-general for human rights. Between 2014 and 2015, the number of refugees and displaced persons increased by 20 percent, reaching a record high of 60 million. Between 2013 and 2014, the number of people killed in conflicts around the world increased 33 percent.

“A lot of [these]conflicts can be attributed to the clash between aspirations and opportunities,” Šimonović said. “Access to information has never been better, which means people are aware that life can be better than how they’re living. This leads to frustration, dissatisfaction, and demand for change.

“If regimes do not want to change . . . what does that lead to? Rebellion, extremism, and terrorism.”

With the number of violent incidences climbing, interventions such as Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter—which allows the UN Security Council to take military and nonmilitary action to restore international peace and security—need to happen once red flags appear, and not after mass atrocities and widespread abuses have already occurred, Šimonović said.

One of the earliest signs of impending mass violence is dehumanizing language, he said. In the case of the Rwandan genocide exactly 22 years ago, the country’s radio station Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines broadcasted racist propaganda to incite hatred against the Tutsi ethnic group, calling them “cockroaches” and “snakes,” and accusing them of being witches.

“Genocide doesn’t come out of the blue. Not even sexual violence comes out of the blue—sexual violence in conflicts is a reflection of the treatment of women during peacetime,” Šimonović said.

“There are patterns and symptoms of human rights violations that can predict that we’re heading toward potential mass atrocities… One of these is dehumanization—saying that this group isn’t human. It was the case for Jews, the same for the Tutsis, and it is happening now with the Yazidis [an Iraqi ethnic and religious minority].”

Other presenters included Matthew Waxman, the Liviu Librescu Professor of Law at Columbia University, and Celia Fisher, PhD, the Marie Ward Doty University Chair in Ethics and director of Center for Ethics Education.

Waxman, an expert on national security law who worked at the White House during George W. Bush’s administration, spoke about the use of torture in counterterrorism efforts and how we might structure laws to clarify interrogation policies in the event of national crises.

Fisher discussed the ethical dilemma that psychologists face when called upon to do diagnostic assessments in death penalty cases. According to the American Psychological Association’s ethics code, psychologists must uphold ethical standards and protect human rights even when these standards conflict with the law.

Death sentences are disproportionately given to poor and disenfranchised people, because these populations often lack equal access to due process, Fisher said. Because the law is inequitable and thus immoral, psychologists should refuse to participate in the process, she argued.

The panel was moderated by Andrea Bartoli, PhD, dean of the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University.

Four years later, he’s back in the news, as he revealed he is HIV positive in a TODAY interview with Matt Lauer.

“It’s a hard three letters to absorb. It’s a turning point in one’s life,” the 50-year-old actor said to Lauer.

Human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, is living inside the bodies of an estimated 35 million people worldwide. In the United States, 1.2 million people are living with HIV and the U.S. fails to prevent about another 50,000 infections every year. (source)

What does this high profile celebrity having HIV mean for the stigma often associated with the virus, or how the public is educated on the disease?

Fordham’s Celia Fisher, PhD, the director of both Fordham’s Center for Ethics Education and the HIV and Drug Abuse Prevention Research Ethics Training Institute, said a lot has changed since 1991, when NBA great Magic Johnson announced he was HIV positive.

“For those in countries where medication is widely available becoming HIV positive has become a chronic disease, rather than a death sentence on a path towards AIDS,” she said. “The risk of becoming infected has also been reduced through HIV prevention medications such as PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) that can prevent the acquisition of HIV, as well as evidence that taking certain HIV medications can lessen the risk of further transmission. There is also growing interest in using emerging technologies for HIV prevention, such as mobile health text reminders to take medication and the use of social media to increase HIV health literacy.”

Despite these medical gains, Fisher said, sexual and gender minority youth in the United States, and women in countries with extreme gender inequities and other marginalized populations, do not have access to these treatments.

“These inequities raise ethical challenges for public health policy makers, health providers, and medical and social behavioral researchers,” Fisher said. “The Fordham University HIV and Drug Abuse Prevention Research Ethics Training Institute is dedicated to training researchers how to uncover and address the causes of these inequities to create an AIDS-free world.”

To learn more about the hard data generated by the HIV and Drug Abuse Prevention Research Ethics Training Institute at Fordham—the only one of its kind, read this piece from last November.

For more information on HIV, see this article by Fordham alumnus, Mathew Rodriguez (FCLC ’11), in Mic.

The report, which SAMHSA released today, concludes that, in fact, such therapy can be “devastatingly harmful” to those who undergo its treatment.

SAMHSA and the American Psychological Association (APA) convened a panel of advisers in July to examine the scientific and clinical data behind conversion, or reparative, therapy—a treatment that aims to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

The ensuing report, “Ending Conversion Therapy: Supporting and Affirming LGBTQ Youth,” found that the therapy is based on pseudoscience and did not meet the professional and ethical standards of the mental health professions. At best, these therapies are ineffective, and at worst, they can be profoundly detrimental, said Fisher.

“These therapies can involve very harmful treatments such as shock therapy—that is, showing an individual [photos of]a particular gender and shocking the individual so as to prevent a sexual response,” said Fisher, the Marie Ward Doty Endowed Chair and a professor of psychology.

“It can also involve berating and focusing on the immorality of the sexual orientation or gender identity. Basically, it’s a punitive form of treatment that has no scientific or clinical basis.”

Experts were called upon to examine the controversial therapy following the suicide of transgender teenager Leelah Alcorn, 17, whose parents forced her to participate in conversion therapy. The public outcry following her death led to the drafting of Leelah’s Law, which would ban the therapy.

SAMHSA’s report is an important step in the White House’s commitment to expanding the number of states who enact the law, said Fisher. Some studies estimate as many as one-third of children and adolescents who identify as a sexual or gender minority has undergone some kind of conversion therapy.

“Children, youth, and even young adults can experience post-traumatic stress disorder as a result, because it’s so stressful to be under these punitive and harsh conditions. It can also lead to depression or can increase a sense of dysphoria and further alienate individuals from their families,” Fisher said. “And, as in Leelah’s case, it can result in suicide.”

The report indicates that variations in gender identity and sexual orientation are normal in children. However, because of the prejudice and stigma they face, LGBT youth are particularly vulnerable to depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses.

“But it’s not because of these children’s identity [as LGBT individuals]—it’s because of the way they’re treated by their families, their schools, and society,” Fisher said. “These are the conditions… that any disenfranchised and marginalized group may experience.”

The way to support sexual and gender minority youth, she said, is to affirm and accept each individual and to support his or her need for self-expression. The idea is not to push young people in one direction or another, but rather to give them space to explore.

Moreover, mental health professionals, physicians, school personnel, and others who work with children and adolescents need additional training in LGBT issues to better understand the needs of these populations, Fisher said.

“The issues included in this report are intended to enhance the lives and well-being of sexual and gender minority youth by helping to ensure they receive informed, evidence-based, and bias-free services. The systematic elimination of conversion type therapies is critical to the goal of reducing the health disparities facing this vulnerable population.”

Read more on the Ethics and Society blog.

Here’s one: A researcher, separately interviewing two people who engage in unprotected sex, learns that one is HIV-positive and hasn’t told the other. Should the researcher violate confidentiality by alerting the non-infected partner?

This is just the kind of quandary addressed at a training institute founded four years ago by Celia Fisher, Ph.D., the Marie Ward Doty University Chair and professor of psychology at Fordham. The HIV and Drug Abuse Prevention Research Ethics Training Institute—the only one of its kind—trains scholars to gather data that clarifies ethics questions and shows how they might be resolved.

“What we’re trying to do is to have evidence-based ethical decision-making,” said Fisher, director of the Center for Ethics Education, of which the institute is part. “People have been training in research ethics in general, but nobody has trained people how to do studies to produce evidence on research ethics. We’re the first institute to ever do that.”

It was the dearth of this type of research that led Fisher to found the institute four years ago with a $1.6 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health. Every year, it has admitted six to eight fellows—all of whom have medical or doctoral degrees—and trained them to identify and study ethics questions, produce and publish a research project, and win further grants. They attend a 10-day session the first summer, a five-day session the next, and receive guidance from faculty mentors.

“Our goal is to create a new generation of HIV and drug abuse researchers who are studying ethics, and who are getting grants in ethics, who will be publishing about ethics,” Fisher said.

So far, fellows have published at least 16 articles about how to create scientific knowledge while also respecting the confidentiality of the people involved in studies and treating them humanely and respectfully.

For example, one fellow learned how to address the ethical concerns that arose in her study of HIV prevention practices among female sex workers in the Philippines.

She conducted the study via an advisory board—including health officials, academic experts, former sex workers, and others—that investigated the participants’ privacy worries and provided information on avoiding HIV and improving their circumstances. The women gave in-depth interviews instead of filling out surveys.

It was an effective approach that allowed the women to safeguard their interests and play a more active role in the study rather than feel “researched upon,” said the fellow, Lianne Urada, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine.

Another institute fellow, Brenda Curtis, Ph.D., studied the ways in which researchers protect study subjects’ privacy—and verify that they are who they say they are—when contacting them via social media, which is useful for enlisting members of hard-to-reach populations.

Her research highlighted the various ethical issues involved, as well as the need for researchers to involve their institutional review boards at the outset of their projects so the boards’ concerns can be addressed, said Curtis, a research associate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.

She and Urada praised the institute for the continuing support it offers; both have won high-level NIH grants for further ethics research.

Other fellows’ studies have upended some of the assumptions underlying ethical dilemmas. One study found that there is, in fact, a way around the stigma that keeps lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) teens in Thailand from asking their parents for permission to take part in HIV prevention studies, Fisher said.

When interviewed, parents—who didn’t know whether their children were LGBT—said they would be willing to let their children’s schools approve their participation instead, as long as the children’s privacy was protected. (See Inside Fordham V. 37, No. 2 for more on Fisher’s new funding on ways to question LGBT teens about HIV.)

Some of Fisher’s research also showed that drug users who were paid to participate in a study used the money to buy clothes and food—not more drugs. “That kind of research has changed how people look at whether or not it’s fair to pay drug users” to take part in studies, she said.

And as for those study participants who hadn’t told their partners that they’re HIV-positive, Fisher said, some of her research indicates that they recognize their moral obligation to do so, and would be receptive to the researcher at least warning the other partner to take precautions.

The researcher can also try to convince the HIV-positive partner to have a talk with the other partner, another option for maintaining the confidentiality essential to winning study participants’ trust.

“It’s what I have called the scientist-citizen dilemma,” Fisher said. “As the scientists, we’re obligated to maintain confidentiality; as a citizen and human being, we are obligated to help those who we know are in danger.”

What does it mean to live in a surveillance state? The Al Jazeera America program, Fault Lines, investigates the fallout over the National Security Agency’s mass data collection programs in the U.S. and abroad.

Ethics expert, Celia Fisher, Ph.D., the Mary Ward Doty Endowed University Chair and Professor of Psychology, is featured in the program, which premieres on Al Jazeera America on Friday, Nov.1, at 10:30 p.m. ET. The program will repeat on Al Jazeera America on Nov. 2, at 7p ET, and then air on Al Jazeera English on Nov. 6, at 6:30p ET.

In the episode, Fisher discusses the psychological effects and ethical implications of surveillance. The program will also feature in-depth interviews with journalist Glenn Greenwald and NSA director Keith Alexander.

– Gina Vergel

The American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) has named Celia Fisher, Ph.D., the Marie Ward Doty University Chair and professor of psychology, as a 2012 AAAS Fellow.

Fisher, who is also the founding director of Fordham’s Center for Ethics Education, is one of 702 AAAS members around the world to be named a Fellow for their significant efforts to advance science.

Fisher has been recognized for her “distinguished contributions that enhance the responsible conduct of science across disciplinary boundaries through innovative research, regulatory leadership, and ground-breaking education and training initiatives.”

“I am thrilled and honored that through this award, this prestigious group of scientists has recognized the importance of creating an evidence-based approach to research ethics and the contributions that social science can make to enhancing regulation and training that promotes the best of science- and research-participant protections,” Fisher said.

The 2012 AAAS Fellows will be formally announced in the AAAS “News & Notes” section of the journal Science on Nov. 30, and will be presented on Feb. 16 at the Fellows Forum during the 2013 AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston.

In addition to directing the Center for Ethics Education, Fisher is a past chair of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Human Studies Review Board and a founding editor of Applied Developmental Science. She is the author of Decoding the Ethics Code: A Practical Guide for Psychologists (Sage Publications, 2009) and is the co-editor of eight books.

In 2011, Fisher was awarded a five-year grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to develop the Fordham HIV Prevention Research Ethics Training Institute (RETI) to offer ethics training and financial support for a mentored research project that will contribute to evidenced-based research ethics practices.

Her research interests include ethical issues and the wellbeing of vulnerable populations, including ethnic minority youth and families, active drug users, college students at risk for drinking problems, and adults with impaired consent capacity.

— Joanna Klimaski

Fisher, who is also the founding director of Fordham’sCenter for Ethics Education, is one of 702 AAAS members around the world to be named a Fellow for their significant efforts to advance science.

Fisher has been recognized for her “distinguished contributions that enhance the responsible conduct of science across disciplinary boundaries through innovative research, regulatory leadership, and ground-breaking education and training initiatives.”

“I am thrilled and honored that through this award, this prestigious group of scientists has recognized the importance of creating an evidence-based approach to research ethics and the contributions that social science can make to enhancing regulation and training that promotes the best of science- and research-participant protections,” Fisher said.

The 2012 AAAS Fellows award will be presented on Feb. 16 at the Fellows Forum during the 2013 AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston.

In addition to directing the Center for Ethics Education, Fisher is a past chair of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Human Studies Review Board and a founding editor of Applied Developmental Science. She is the author of Decoding the Ethics Code: A Practical Guide for Psychologists (Sage Publications, 2009) and is the co-editor of eight books.

In 2011, Fisher was awarded a five-year grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to develop theFordham HIV Prevention Research Ethics Training Institute (RETI) to offer ethics training and financial support for a mentored research project that will contribute to evidenced-based research ethics practices.

Her research interests include ethical issues and the wellbeing of vulnerable populations, including ethnic minority youth and families, active drug users, college students at risk for drinking problems, and adults with impaired consent capacity.