Disorders and homosexuality

[electric_sheep]

*Originally posted by Bippy the Beardless *
Yes electric!sheep when I said justified, I meant justified from the point of view of the society, not justified in any moral sense. But the Holocaust example gives a good reason for my belief that any society that is not answerable to all its citizens exists on dangerous ground. Democracy for instance has the danger of being ruler ship by the majority at the expense of the minorities, but with the requirement that the democratic society is answerable too its citizens for anything it does makes for a more moral form of government.

Actually, I meant to point out that lack of opposition does not necessarily equate with perceived justification.

[KellyM]

Oh, whee, this again.

Allow me to repost what I said the last time this came up (well, at least a previous time):

[W]hile “conversion” is a remote possibility, years of clinical research support that conversion is far less likely to be successful than other approaches, and as such therapists should not recommend conversion as a therapeutic method. The conclusion that “an unknown, but almost certainly small, fraction of gays may be able to live vaguely satisfactory lives after conversion therapy” does not alter the parameters of therapeutic recommendation: conversion remains a poor choice of therapeutic approaches (accomodation having a much better chance for success).

In my opinion, a therapist should not counsel a patient to undertake a course of therapy which is unlikely to yield satisfactory results unless all other options (including no therapy at all) are no more likely to yield satisfactory results. A therapist must (is legally required to) disclose to a patient the likelihood of satisfactory results of a therapeutic approach as well as the likelihood of satisfactory results from meaningful alternatives, including no action but not including alternatives which are less likely to be satisfactory than no action. The therapist must also advise the patient of the risks of all alternatives offered.

Given the research to date and the constraints of ethical practice, I do not believe that a therapist can properly counsel a patient to undertake conversion therapy without evidence that the patient’s desire not to be gay is so intractable as not to be altered at all. At the very least, conversion therapy should not be considered until after extensive therapy to identify the source of the reason the patient does not wish to be gay and to identify why the patient is unwilling or unable to accomodate to being gay (which is the recommended approach for dystonic homosexuality, based on decades of clinical research). The therapist’s goal is to “improve the quality of the patient’s life”, not to “service the patient’s superficial desires”.

(Emphasis added)

The desire to have limbs amputated is called “apotemnophilia” and has also been discussed before.