I’m not clear on one point. Do you feel a therapy being ineffective is sufficient grounds to restrict it or does it have to be unsafe?
Well, the drug laws require medications to be both safe and effective. I’d like to see medical procedures held to the same standard. That’s more of an opinion than a strong legal stance.
But the fact that drugs must be safe and effective indicates that laws requiring these qualifications are constitutional.
That doesn’t follow. There’s no constitutional right of consumption. The government can enact legislation on what you can eat or drink or wear. But speech is a protected right so the government should have to meet a higher standard on what you can say or listen to.
But this is a side-issue. I still feel we need to address the issue of harm. Let’s talk about aromatherapy as an example. These are people who light scented candles to make their subjects feel better. There’s virtually no evidence that it works as a cure. But there’s also no evidence that smelling a candle can hurt you either.
In your opinion, should aromatherapy be legally restricted? Is the fact that it’s ineffective enough grounds to restrict it even if it’s harmless?
I’d like to see a legal crackdown on a whole lot of woo medical practices. Homeopaths, vitamin supplements, and a host of other bullshit, of which conversion therapy is only a minor part.
Fraud is not protected speech.
When it’s sold as a medical treatment for ailments and illnesses, yes, it should be banned. When it’s sold as a way to feel good and happy and soothed and relaxed, then I see no problem. The instant an AT vendor says it’s a treatment for high blood pressure, I say fine 'em and hard.
Society isn’t telling anyone here what their sexual orientation should be. They’re preventing licensed professionals from pushing snake oil.
It seems to me the onus is on you to provide evidence this crap actually works or the government has no business regulating what its licensing rather than pretending the first amendment protects state sanctioned fraud.
Okay, let’s talk about fraud (I feel like I’m engaged in several debates simultaneously).
Where do you draw the line of fraud? What percentage of gay people who have undergone gay conversion therapy have converted to heterosexuality? Are people saying it’s zero percent - that nobody has ever changed their sexual orientation? Or are we just saying it’s low - like one percent or five percent or ten percent?
What statistical benchmarks pass muster for drugs or therapies licensed medical professionals are allowed to use? Why do you keep putting this on us?
I want to question the premise here, is most “conversion therapy” indeed just talking? I recall reading somewhere that at least some forms involve emotional and/or physical abuse.
Why don’t we talk about this issue of harm with regard to gay conversion therapy instead? The American Psychological Association’s Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Clients require that “Psychologists understand that … efforts to change sexual orientation have not been shown to be effective or safe.”
Their Rationale for this guideline says “The potential for SOCE to cause harm to many clients also has been demonstrated…Haldeman (2002) describes a spectrum of negative client outcomes from failed attempts at conversion therapy. These include intimacy avoidance, sexual dysfunction, depression, and suicidality.” And from the Application section: “The potential for SOCE to cause harm to many clients has been noted (APA, 2009a; Shidlo & Schroeder, 2002; Haldeman, 2001, 2004). These emotional concerns may include avoidance of intimate relationships, depression and anxiety, problems with sexual functioning, suicidal feelings, and a sense of being doubly stigmatized for being gay and unable to change.”
Do you have some special secret evidence that the APA does not know about that proves that gay conversion therapy cannot cause any actual harm to patients? If so, please share it with us. If not, perhaps you could stop asking us to accept that it is harmless just because you have a “theory”.
There have been some really awful things done to people in an attempt to “cure” them of homosexuality, mostly as a form of aversion therapy. I’ll quote from the judge’s opinion for the California case (PDF):
However, “The plaintiff mental health providers in these cases use only non-aversive treatments” and “The record shows that Plaintiffs who are licensed mental health providers practice SOCE only through talk therapy.”
I honestly am just trying to have a discussion of this topic. I didn’t start this thread with the intention of advocating any particular point of view. I’m certainly not trying to secretly pushing some anti-gay agenda. But I appear to be the only person willing to discuss one side of the issue even in hypothetical terms so to keep the discussion going I guess I’m playing the devil’s advocate.
Is it possible that people in this thread are using two different definitions of “harm”? Like, people saying “SOCE has some adverse psychological outcomes” and people saying “SOCE isn’t solely responsible for a large number of suicides” will easily talk past each other if they’re both using just the word “harm.”
The thing is, happy, healthy, perfectly well-adjusted people rarely go into therapy. For anything. People who seek therapy, other than pro forma, have some conflict they want resolved. So there’s never going to be a study on the effects of SOCE on people who were perfectly happy with their orientation, weren’t suffering under parental or societal pressure to change, weren’t experiencing that sort of conflict in their lives.
It’s zero percent. Conversion therapy does absolutely nothing at all. Follow up studies with people in ex-gay programs show a 97% failure rating. Now, I’m guessing you’re saying, “What about that 3%?” But the people who come out of these programs don’t always immediately say it’s a failure. A lot of them come out saying it worked. Some of them marry. Some of them have kids. And then, eventually, they realize that the therapy did nothing, and they’re still as gay as they ever were.
So, does that 3% represent people for whom the treatment actually worked? Or are they people who needed a little more time before their true orientation reasserted itself?
I’m pretty sure it’s the latter.
Something I found interesting about the Shidlo and Schroeder study was that, of the eight people (4% of respondents) who claimed that after gay conversion therapy they were exclusively heterosexual in their behavior and had little if any homosexual desires, seven of them worked as “ex-gay” counselors. Three did this as volunteers, four got paid for it. While I can believe that someone who has successfully changed something about themselves might be inspired to help others do the same, it seems a bit fishy that fully half of the respondents who reported that gay conversion therapy was totally effective for them make money by convincing people that gay conversion therapy is effective.
I realize this borders on “No True Scotsman” territory, but I think there’s also room to question whether some of the self-reported gay conversion success stories were actually gay to begin with. I could probably think of eight people I know personally who “experimented in college” but have been mostly or exclusively heterosexual in their behavior ever since, and that’s without any gay conversion therapy. None of them identified as gay in the first place, but if they’d come from very homophobic backgrounds maybe they would have freaked out about a drunken dorm room kiss that turned out not to be totally unpleasant and decided that they needed to be “cured”.
It’s extremely difficult to characterize it unambigiously. Anti-smoking aversion therapy is unpleasant, almost by definition. they attempt to make your mind associate smoking with ugly sights and nasty smells. It’s stressful. But is it “abusive?” Adults, at least, are there voluntarily, and can leave at any time. Is Army basic training “abusive?” There’s some yelling and name-calling…
When it’s done to minors, then, yes, in my opinion it is abusive. Minors have (or feel) much less freedom simply to get up and walk out. They have fewer psychological defense mechanisms against being yelled at.
But I think that such aversion therapy is not necessarily abusive in its nature, or, more properly, that there is some ambiguity in the definition.
I’ve tacitly backed off from the idea that SOCE mimics abuse. But even for therapies that do, we’re back to homosexuality isn’t unhealthy, while smoking is.
I looked up today a piece from The American Prospect that I remembered reading about a year ago. It’s called “My So-Called Ex-Gay Life”, and is about both the rise and fall of the gay conversion movement and the personal experiences of the author (Gabriel Arana) as a teen gay conversion therapy patient. You can read it at My So-Called Ex-Gay Life - The American Prospect
The author’s therapist was Joseph Nicolosi, who had a practice in California and was also president of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). Nicolosi did not use aversion therapy in treating Arana, and Arana does not describe his methods as being abusive. But he doesn’t think the experience was harmless either. He says the therapy (“We mostly talked about how my damaged masculine identity manifested itself in my attractions to other boys”) made him feel worse about himself, that Nicolosi convinced him that his parents were to blame for his homosexuality, and that Nicolosi also pushed him to cut off his best friend because she was a girl and he needed to focus on forming non-sexual friendships with other boys. Even after he stopped therapy: