President Obama last week declared his support of a ban on gay conversion therapy for minors, a psychotherapeutic practice that attempts to change LGBTQ sexual orientations to heterosexuality using a variety of physical and psychological methods. The President’s statement (released by senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett) was a response to a We the People petition seeking to ban the so-called therapies.
Photo by Daniel Tobias via flickr / Wikimedia Commons
As the April 10 article from LiveScience (reprinted below) points out, “Gay conversion therapy — which its supporters claim can change the orientation of gay, lesbian and transgender people — has a long track record of not working, according to a review of the scientific literature published by the American Psychological Association (APA).”
That Obama would take this stand and, “have science on his side,” as the article puts it, sounds positive. But that assumes one should need science to take a stand on what, at essence, is an inhumane practice. Why is science the only measure those in authority should be able to use with validity in this instance?
Along those lines, what does mental disorder look like, anyway, and why only consider the mental? Why the necessity for an ideal psychological arrangement? These questions and more came up in a Planet Waves staff email thread today; you’re invited to read the President’s statement and the article below and add your voice to the conversation.
Why Gay Conversion Therapy Is Harmful
by Tia Ghose, LiveScience Staff Writer | April 10, 2015 02:36pm ET
The Obama administration recently declared its support of a ban on minors receiving a controversial form of psychotherapy known as gay conversion therapy (also called LGBTQ conversion therapy). In supporting the ban, the president may have science on his side.
“The overwhelming scientific evidence demonstrates that conversion therapy, especially when it is practiced on young people, is neither medically nor ethically appropriate and can cause substantial harm,” Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, said in a statement.
Gay conversion therapy — which its supporters claim can change the orientation of gay, lesbian and transgender people — has a long track record of not working, according to a review of the scientific literature published by the American Psychological Association (APA).
What’s more, research suggests the treatment can worsen feelings of self-hatred and anxiety, because it encourages people to fight or hate a sexual orientation that can’t be changed. [5 Surprising Facts About Gay Conversion Therapy]
Ineffective treatment
The proposed national ban, known as Leelah’s Law, was named after a transgender teen, Leelah Alcorn, who committed suicide in December 2014 after receiving treatment from therapists she said were biased and hostile toward her identity. Currently, licensed therapists cannot provide conversion therapy to minors in California, New Jersey or the District of Columbia, but the practice remains legal elsewhere in the country.
But is there scientific evidence to support a national ban on the practice?
Because being gay is not considered a mental disorder, most psychological organizations don’t endorse treatments to change sexual orientation, which may be influenced by a person’s genes. Research suggests that gay conversion therapy does not produce long-lasting sexual-orientation change in people who undergo it. In 2009, an American Psychological Association task force conducted a review of studies on gay conversion therapy between 1963 and 2007. They found that sexual-orientation change was uncommon; participants continued to be attracted to members of their own sex and not to those of the opposite sex.
In addition, because the therapy isn’t approved by any psychological organizations, there are no guidelines on how to conduct it, and no standard metrics of success.
Historically, psychologists used tactics such as aversion therapy — a method reminiscent of the one used in “A Clockwork Orange.” In aversion therapy, gay people were exposed to a negative stimulus (such as being shocked, given nausea drugs or imagining such exposures) while viewing same-sex erotic material. A few studies found this could dampen sexual responsiveness to same-sex erotica but did nothing to change sexual orientation, according to “Homosexuality: Research Implications for Public Policy” (Sage Publications Inc., 1991).
Fueling self-hatred
Nowadays, many gay conversion therapies use talk therapy and tie same-sex attraction to familial dysfunction — an overbearing mother or an uninvolved father, for instance.
The senior media editor at the Huffington Post, Gabriel Arana, chronicled his experience with gay conversion therapy in a 2013 piece for The American Prospect. His gay conversion therapist pinned Arana’s same-sex attraction on the fact “that I felt inadequate because I had not had sufficient male affirmation in childhood.”
But according to the APA, scientists don’t agree on what causes someone to be gay. Some early studies hint that genetics or the regulation of certain genes may play a role in determining sexual orientation and, at the least, indicate that being gay is not a “choice,” science suggests.
The APA report also revealed some evidence that gay conversion therapies increased the risk of negative outcomes, including loss of sexual feeling, anxiety, depression and suicidal feelings. In early aversive-therapy techniques, many people dropped out of treatment, the report found. High dropout rates can be an indication that many people found the treatment too harmful to continue.
According to the APA review, people who underwent modern talk-based gay conversion therapy also reported being harmed by it.
For instance, Samuel Brinton, a nuclear scientist who works on energy policy in Washington, D.C., reported seeing ex-gay therapists for years during his teen years, when his religious parents found out about his orientation.
One of those therapists told Brinton he was the last gay man on Earth and that, because “all gay men had AIDS,” the 13-year-old Brinton did as well, he said in an interview with LGBTQ Nation.
The therapist also told him his chances of getting into heaven were “shrinking every day.” Doctors also put copper coils around his wrists and blasted them with heat whenever he was shown pictures of men holding hands, he reported. During the course of the treatment, Brinton attempted suicide several times, according to the news report.
Follow Tia Ghose on Twitterand Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Originally published on Live Science.
I don’t think evidence derived by scientific method is necessary to completely ban a practice like this. A touch of humanity will do it.
The highest possible number of young people should be exposed to the idea that it’s not okay for Mom and Dad to take you to someone who’s going to tell you awful things about yourself so you can become who they want you to be. It’s criminal to do this to a person of any age, and especially a young person. It’s like hazing for entry into the cult of heterosexuality. It’s torture by kin.
I would question why we need to take it on the APA’s authority that conversion therapy is ridiculous. I’m tempted to throw the baby out with the bathwater when I note that APA is in financial cahoots with big pharma. I’m sure the APA has lots of good people with good heads on their shoulders, who got into psychology to help people in earnest, but this is the same APA whose members are prescribing humanity numbing drugs en masse not only to adults but young people who are still developing neurologically… not cool.
So, why seek their authority on sexuality as a mental disorder. This is the same “they” who makes it possible to have those awful commercials and web-ads and sound bites on the radio urging us to “ask our doctor if we…”
The article says that being gay isn’t considered a mental disorder, in the sense that if it were considered a Mental Disorder, psychologists know what to do with it. Mental disorder is a category that often means that people are too liberally prescribed medications that make their human impulses insensible to them. No real happiness, no sex, no fruitive melancholy, just a dull haze. There’s a joke about if Prozac existed “back then”, Edgar Allan Poe would say “hello birdy” and Marx would suggest that tweaking capitalism might make it work after all.
I think Americans worship at the altar of Science and so infrequently get up from bowing prostrate that they don’t see the other possibilities of what truth might look like. Science finds truths by eliminating possibilities. That’s the scientific method, and it’s useful for lots of things. But I don’t think truth (or health, or psychology, or total well being…) works in such a linear way. And when we say “science tells us….”, what we’re saying is, Science, Our Father Who art in Heaven….
Very excellent points, Ichrak, but perhaps the public worships at the altar of science because they don’t understand nor appropriately utilize the scientific method.
I think that when it comes to the body and understanding its proper physiological functioning, science does have an upper hand there. Science is founded on theoretical constructs that can be tested and scrutinized until proven false or improbable. Just because people choose to blindly believe heavily promoted theoretical suggestions (that have withstood rigorous testing and peer review) without fully understanding what they are, has more to say about the state of the collective psyche and mass psychology than the scientific method itself.
When referring to Science, we are referring to the rigorous application of the scientific method–a collective and communal peer review process. The reference relates to an amalgamation of theoretical ideas; it is not referring to a kind of unquestionable, priestly authority, but to a system that strives for collaboration and collective synthesis. I think that when it comes to the body, there is a proper or more or less ideal arrangement. One’s mental state (science has found) has largely to do with one’s biological state. So, your body and your mind are inseparable and dependent upon one another. This is all Saturn/Kronos stuff. There are rules, and it’s wise to follow them if you wish to function properly and survive.
Ultimately, science meets a limitation when it comes to exploring beyond the physical universe, which exists solely in the mind, a mind that generates the illusion of space and time. So, I’m not going to turn to science to answer any larger existential questions, but I do trust that science can help me to understand how my body works and how it should properly function.
Many health organizations are heavily involved in promoting certain political and economic agendas, but they’re still promoting sound scientific theories that have shown to be useful. People are not really forced to take drugs (though yes, they’re strongly encouraged, and children prescribed drugs is a very different matter. Vaccinations are also a separate issue here). They choose to take them themselves based on a suggestion. The mass (and unnecessary) saturation of pharmaceuticals on the public is atrocious, but the problem, I think, lies more in an obsequious response to the allopathic medical system as well as calculated marketing strategies…. and laziness.
Scientific fundamentalism is a very real problem today, but like religious fundamentalism, the problem lies not so much in the concept of God, but in the lens through which the fundamentalist interprets God. So, it’s all a matter of interpretation, what we do with the data that science uncovers and how we choose to apply it. A good example of this would be the Lipid Hypothesis or “The Diet Heart Theory”, which has been the dogma regarding the genesis of cardiovascular disease for decades. The data is clear: cholesterol is seen to build up in the arteries of patients suffering from things like atherosclerosis. However, the interpretation of that data is misleading and, I believe, responsible for the deaths and suffering of millions of people. So, we blame cholesterol and saturated fats as the “cause” of these diseases, instead of considering the alternative: that cholesterol is only present to help heal another underlying issue (most likely damage to the arteries caused by vegetable oils and trans fats. It’s an antioxidant!).
The American Heart Association was founded to promote this interpretation, so the whole point of the organization is to sell this idea on to the public, meanwhile making Big Pharma very rich selling statin drugs. The use of antidepressants is a similar situation. There is strong evidence to suggest that mental illness is related to a biochemical imbalance. The application of antidepressant drugs does counteract this. It is a valid solution but founded on a very narrow lens of the problem. It’s true that they help, but the problem is much vastly than low levels of neurotransmitters in the brain. Unfortunately, empowering people to heal themselves and change lifestyles isn’t so profitable.
So, really, Science has been hijacked by fundamentalists and marketing strategists who convince the public that a risk factor is a cause, or a drug will cure all their woes and ills. We have to be diligent when considering any theoretical suggestion and apply the method ourselves, to the best of our ability. The APA does heavily promote some narrow views, but likely because they are inevitably in cahoots with Big Pharma just like everybody else.