Field Notes: Sexual Health

With Dr. Kristen Mark

Transcript

Hi, I am Dr. Kristen Mark. I'm the Director of Graduate Studies for the CCAPS Sexual Health Programs. I'm also a professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health.

How is the field of sexual health changing?

Our understanding has shifted in sexuality research and continues to shift and will continue to shift. And this is beneficial for our research because it means there are always questions to be answered. It is kind of shocking how little we know about some aspects of sexual health. And that just means that the field is wide open for people to answer really important questions that influence our overall well-being.

Why is it important for a therapist to know about sexual health?

This is especially important for people who work with couples, for example. It's something that comes up all the time, and it's not something that people get much training on in their general therapy training. It's important to be comfortable with talking about those things, and that's one piece of it. But it's also important to be knowledgeable about how to treat these issues, because unfortunately, harm can be done when these issues are not treated in the empirically supported ways that we know, uh, are necessary for adequately treating sexual issues.

How has technology impacted the field of sexual health?

It has just blown up and has completely changed the landscape of how people sort of learn about sex. And so, that means that we need things like media literacy to teach kids, so that when they inevitably come across something that they know that it's not real or they know how to navigate that.

And then we've also seen really big shifts in terms of people searching for, like, what did we used to do pre-internet age when we had a question about sex? You would like look in your encyclopedia or you would, like, try and ask a friend or a peer, and we see less of that happening now and more of Googling what that looks like and what that might be, which, you know, can not result—it doesn't necessarily result in accurate information. And so again, we need this literacy component to be taught around how to find accurate information and how to consume this stuff with a critical eye.