Lamia
May 5, 2012, 8:43pm
27
IANAP, but I can see how it might be considered unethical to use therapy to “treat” something that isn’t considered a mental health problem in the first place. However, I believe you’re right that the real ethical issues with ex-gay therapy are that it 1) doesn’t work and 2) is likely to cause psychological harm to the patient. Here are some figures I looked up for a previous thread :
Ariel Shidlo and Michael Schroeder’s 2002 study “Changing Sexual Orientation: A Consumers’ Report”** seems to be the best study on how successful “ex-gay” therapies actually are. This study involved interviewing 202 people who had undergone sexual orientation conversion intervention. 13% (26 people) of these people considered themselves to be success stories, but nearly half of these still experienced repeated “slips” into homosexual behavior. Of the remaining 14 people, 6 reported having successfully stopped engaging in homosexual behavior but still experienced some same-sex desire and did not self-identify as heterosexual. Only 8 people (4%) self-identified as heterosexual and reported exclusively engaging in heterosexual behavior with little or no same-sex desire.
[snip]
The majority (77%) of the participants in Shidlo and Schroeder’s study indicated not only that the therapy hadn’t changed their sexual orientation, but that it had done them significant long-term damage. (Another 10% reported experiencing neither change in orientation nor any long-term psychological harm.) 11 participants reported attempting suicide after undergoing “ex-gay” therapy. Only 3 of these had previously attempted suicide. So it looks to me like “ex-gay” therapy is at least as likely to make people want to kill themselves as it is to result in a successful conversion to heterosexuality.
[snip]
**Professional Psychology: Research and Practice , 2002, Vol. 33, No. 3, 249–259