Zell, a therapist and Ph.D. student, examines suicide risk among transgender youth and the protective role of support systems such as family, peers, and schools
Holly Zell
By Taylor Pedersen, CLA Student Writer - November 13, 2025
By the time Holly Zell reached her fifth year as a Ph.D. student in psychology at the School of Psychological Science, she had already lived what many of her peers in academia might only study. For years, she sat across from clients in community clinics, navigating crisis after crisis, watching burnout loom over her colleagues and herself. Before that, she carried the personal weight of losing her father to suicide at age 16, a loss that left questions she would spend years confronting, first as a counselor, now as a researcher.
“I used to say it didn’t influence me at all,” Zell said about her father’s death. “But of course it did. It gave me a comfort level with the topic of suicide that not everyone has. I don’t feel like I’m trying to investigate how my dad died; that’s not something I’ll ever fully understand. But it did spark an existential curiosity about why people make that choice, and that curiosity has never left me.”
Born in Ontario, Canada, Zell began her undergraduate studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, where she majored in business. But by the end of her first semester, she felt out of place. Microeconomics and calculus didn’t resonate, but psychology did. “Intro Psych was the only class I liked,” she said. “I remember my mom once joking that marketing was about selling people things they don’t need, and I thought: ‘is that really what I want to do?’”
She switched majors, drawn in part by her own lived experience after her father’s death. “Psychology gave me a language for questions I’d already been asking,” Zell said.
When her family later moved to Colorado, Zell followed and enrolled in a master's program in clinical mental health counseling at University of Northern Colorado. There, she earned her counseling degree and began work in community mental health.
Zell and her husband eventually relocated to Oregon, where she worked at the Yamhill County community mental health center. She also served on the center’s suicide intervention team. The work was vital, but it was exhausting.
“Caseloads were high, the pay didn’t reflect the workload, and so much of what clients brought into therapy was tied to systemic inequalities we couldn’t fix,” she recalled. “What they really needed was stable housing, food security, and transportation. Therapy can help people cope, but it can’t erase massive income inequality.”
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic only magnified the strain. Overnight, her practice shifted entirely to telehealth, something she had been trained to avoid. “We were told, ‘don’t do telehealth if you can help it,’ and suddenly it was the only option,” she said. “What I learned is that it isn’t inherently worse. For rural clients, it can actually be a lifeline.”
Still, the constant pressure left her burned out. “I realized I do my best therapy work when I’m not doing therapy full-time,” Zell said. “I couldn’t sustain it forever.”
Burnout gave Zell the space to consider a different path, one she had once thought closed to her. Years earlier, she applied to clinical psychology Ph.D. programs and was rejected across the board. “It devastated me,” she said. “I thought it meant I wasn’t good enough. I had to work through a lot of what I was holding that to mean about myself.”
This time, she applied to just one program: Oregon State’s psychology Ph.D. “It was a long shot. I told myself, ‘I probably won’t get in, but maybe this will give me something to hold onto while I figure out what’s next.’” To her surprise, she was accepted.
Now a member of Dr. David Kerr’s lab, Zell is focused on suicide prevention in young adults, with her dissertation examining suicide risk among transgender young people and the protective role of support systems such as family, peers, and schools.
The topic is both professional and personal. As a queer, nonbinary researcher and counselor, Zell has worked closely with LGBTQ+ clients throughout her career. “In community health, younger queer and trans clients were often placed with me, partly because I was out,” Zell said. “Later, in private practice, I made my identity clear on my website so people knew they’d have a safe space.”
Her research is driven by those lived encounters. “There are models of suicide risk that completely ignore systemic oppression,” she said. “But for trans youth, discrimination is central to suicide risk. I want to push toward models that explicitly account for how systemic injustice fuels suicidal thinking.”
Her findings so far underscore what many advocates already know: family support can be life-saving. “When trans youth are respected by their families—when parents use their name, their pronouns, and help them access care—their suicide risk doesn’t increase compared with cisgender youth,” Zell said. “But rejection can be devastating. In those cases, chosen family and queer community become critical.”
Because of her identity and personal history, Zell is no stranger to the critique that she is “too close” to her topic. She doesn’t buy it. “I don’t believe in perfectly objective research,” she said. “Whether you’re inside or outside the community you study, you bring bias. The key is checking your work through collaboration, feedback, and evidence.”
Her stance reflects her counseling background: honesty about subjectivity paired with a commitment to rigor. “I’m not trying to find out if trans people face oppression. That’s a fact. My work asks how those sociopolitical factors interact with suicide risk and what can be done to intervene.”
Looking back, Zell sees her path from a burned-out therapist to a fifth-year doctoral candidate as a process of redefining what success means. “In the past, I measured worth by grades, by productivity,” she said. “Now I think more about balance. How to prioritize wellness over constant output.”
Her research may be rooted in tragedy, but her approach is grounded in hope: that by asking better questions, she can help build a system where fewer families face the loss hers did.
“Suicide is complicated,” Zell said. “But if we can understand the protective power of support, maybe we can make it less common.”