Nanette Kathryn Gartrell is an American psychiatrist, researcher, lesbian activist and writer. Gartrell is the author of over 80 research reports on topics including medical student depression, sexual exploitation of patients by healthcare professionals and sexual minority parent families. Her investigation into physician misconduct led to a clean-up of professional ethics codes and the criminalization of boundary violations. For this work, she was featured in a 1991 PBS Frontline documentary titled My Doctor, My Lover. Among other works, Gartrell is the author of My Answer Is NO. . . . If That's Okay with You: How Women Can Say NO with Confidence. She was also a co-author of an essay in the 2017 book (and subsequent editions) of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. Gartrell is probably best known for being the principal researcher since 1986 for the US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study, which is the longest-running investigation of lesbian mothers and their children in the world.
Early life and education Gartrell was born in 1949. Both of her parents dealt with "significant mental illness", and Gartrell and her two younger siblings grew up with family trauma and economic hardships as a result. At age 11, Gartrell realized that for her own survival, she needed to move to another city once she finished high school. She worked very hard on her studies and earned an academic scholarship to Stanford University. To better understand her family's mental health challenges, she set her sights on becoming a psychiatrist. Within a few months of beginning her studies at Stanford, Gartrell fell in love with a woman, came out as a lesbian, and "ended up face to face with my sexual identity and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders", which at that time said she was mentally ill due to her homosexuality. Knowing that was not true, she said "I decided that I would become a researcher with a goal of learning how to conduct scientific investigations that would provide a much more accurate picture of LGBTQ people than observations of psychiatric inpatients or prison inmates who were forced into experiments that were attempting to change their sexual orientation to heterosexual." During her senior year at Stanford, Gartrell was required to perform a research study under the guidance of a faculty member. She approached H. Keith H. Brodie, then an assistant professor of psychiatry, who became her mentor and began to teach her how to do research. Gartrell's senior project was a survey of psychiatrists' attitudes concerning lesbianism, which was the first of her many research studies on LGBTQ people.
Career After earning her undergraduate degree in 1971 from Stanford, Gartrell earned her medical degree at the University of California, completed a psychiatry residency and fellowship at Harvard Medical School, and has been a Williams Institute Visiting Distinguished Scholar at the UCLA School of Law since 2009. She served on the faculty of Harvard Medical School from 1976 to 1987, and was on the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco from 1988 to 2011. She had a guest appointment at the University of Amsterdam from 2009 to 2025. For 13 years, Gartrell volunteered her psychiatric services to chronically mentally ill homeless people. An experience in one of these shelters became the basis for her 2006 article in the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, "A Tenderloin Tail." The Nanette K. Gartrell papers, a collection of Gartrell's personal, professional, and political life, are archived in the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.
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