Gay Conversion Therapy: What You Should Know
On Monday (Aug. 19), New Jersey became the second state, after California, to sign a ban on therapy that claims to convert gay people into heterosexual. The California law is held up in federal courts on first amendment grounds.
Two other states — Massachusetts and New York — have introduced similar bans in their state legislatures in 2013.
Gay conversion therapy, as it is known, supposedly helps gay people overcome same-sex attractions. But mainstream psychologists say the therapy is ineffective, unethical and often harmful, exacerbating anxiety and self-hatred among those treated for what is not a mental disorder.
Here are five facts about the therapy and the current laws.
1. What's happening in the courts?
Prior to the ban that was signed into law today, gay conversion therapy was already facing legal challenge in New Jersey. In Michael Ferguson, et al., v. JONAH, et al., four former clients of a counseling group called Jonah (Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing) are suing in New Jersey civil court for deceptive practices. The patients argue they paid thousands of dollars for therapies that did not rid them of same-sex attractions, and that they then had to pay for mainstream therapy to repair the damage done by the conversion therapy. That case is still working its way through the courts. [5 Myths About Gay People Debunked]
Two cases challenged California's law banning conversion therapy for minors, which was signed into law in September 2012. The law is now on hold pending the outcome of those cases. In Welch v. Brown, a federal judge is hearing arguments by conservative groups that claim the law is a violation of the right to free speech, freedom of religion and privacy. In a separate case, Pickup v. Brown, therapist David Pickup joined several other conversion therapists, anonymous children and parents to argue that the state's law will deprive his clients of therapy. In April 2013, a federal appeals court judge granted an injunction against the law pending the decision in those cases.
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2. What happens in conversion therapy?
Because conversion therapy is not a mainstream psychological treatment, there are no professional standards or guidelines for how it is conducted. Early treatments in the 1960s and 70s included aversion therapy, such as shocking patients or giving them nausea-inducing drugs while showing them same-sex erotica, according to a 2004 article in the British Medical Journal.
Other methods included psychoanalysis or talk therapy, estrogen treatments to reduce libido in men, and even electroconvulsive therapy, in which an electric shock is used to induce a seizure, with side effects such as memory loss. [7 Absolutely Evil Medical Experiments]
More recently, people who have been through conversion therapy report talk therapy that emphasizes pseudoscientific theories, such as the idea that an overbearing mother and a distant father make a child gay. In an April 2012 essay in The American Prospect, writer Gabriel Arana describes his "ex-gay" therapy experience. His therapist blamed his parents for Arana's homosexuality, and urged him to distance himself from his female best friends.
Chaim Levin, one of the men suing JONAH for deceptive practices, says he quit conversion therapy after his therapist had him strip down and touch himself to "reconnect with his masculinity," according to the New York Times.
3. Why psychologists say conversion therapy doesn't work
Homosexuality is not considered a mental disorder, so the American Psychological Association (APA) does not recommend "curing" same-sex attraction in any case. Instead, societal ignorance, prejudice and pressure to conform to heterosexual desires are the real dangers to gay people's mental health, according to a 1997 statement on "conversion" or "reparative" therapy by the APA.
A 2009 APA task force found that conversion therapies, despite being touted by religious organizations, have little evidence to back them up. A review of studies from 1960 to 2007 found only 83 on the topic, the vast majority of which did not have the experimental muscle to show whether the therapies achieved their stated goals. (Many of the people studied in the early years were court-mandated to take the therapies, adding a coercive element to those outcomes.)
The best-quality studies were more recent and qualitative, the APA task force found, meaning they focused not on the statistical effectiveness of treatment, but of the subjective experience.
"These studies show that enduring change to an individual's sexual orientation is uncommon," the task force wrote in their 2009 report. The participants continued to report same-sex attractions after the conversion therapy, and were not significantly more attracted to the opposite gender.
These studies did find that conversion therapy could be harmful, however. Negative effects included "loss of sexual feeling, depression, suicidality and anxiety."
4. How did conversion therapy get started?
The desire to turn gay people straight goes way back. In 1920, Sigmund Freud wrote of a lesbian patient whose father wanted to see her converted to heterosexuality. Freud echoed modern psychologists by responding that changing sexual orientation was difficult and unlikely. He offered to see the woman anyway, but later broke off the therapy due to her hostility. In 1935, Freud went even further, writing to a woman who wanted her homosexual son converted that homosexuality "is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness."
Other psychologists throughout the early mid-1900s believed homosexuality could be changed and recommended a variety of treatments. One of the stranger attempts was an effort by Viennese endocrinologist Eugen Steinach to transplant testicles from straight men into the scrotums of gay men in an attempt to rid them of same-sex desires. It didn’t work.
One of the most prominent advocates of conversion therapy in the 1940s and 50s was Edmund Bergler, who saw homosexuality as a perversion and believed he could "cure" gay people with a punishment-based, confrontational therapy style.
Once the American Psychiatric Association stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973, conversion therapies lost support. But religious-right organizations such as Exodus International and Focus on the Family's Love Won Out took up the charge, promoting their own "ex-gay" therapies. A small group of psychologists, splitting with their peers, continue to promote the therapies, founding the conversion therapy organization NARTH, or the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality. The group has religious links; for example, one of its founders and former president, psychologist Joseph Nicolosi, is a one-time spokesman for Focus on the Family. In June 2013, Exodus International shut down and former President Alan Chambers publicly apologized for the harm he had caused to the gay community. [The 10 Most Controversial Psychiatric Disorders]
5. What about the one study that found conversion therapies work?
Groups that promote conversion therapy often point to a single study to support their work. In 2003, famed psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, who spearheaded the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association's mental disorder list in 1973, reported in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior that interviews with conversion therapy patients suggested that some people could change their sexual orientation.
The paper was incendiary and highly criticized, given that it relied on interviews with patients instead of measurable benchmarks of same-sex desires. Conservative groups were delighted to have support from Spitzer, who wasn't tainted with religious bias or anti-gay ideology; gay organizations felt betrayed.
In the end, however, Spitzer came to agree with his critics. There was no way to confirm that what his interviewees said was true, he wrote in 2012 to the editor of the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. The study, he said, was fatally flawed.
"I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy," Spitzer wrote.
Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas or Tia Ghose on Twitterand Google+. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.
Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science, covering topics ranging from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior. She was previously a senior writer for Live Science but is now a freelancer based in Denver, Colorado, and regularly contributes to Scientific American and The Monitor, the monthly magazine of the American Psychological Association. Stephanie received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of South Carolina and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.