Sexual conversion therapy : ethical, clinical and research perspectives

A. Shidlo, M. Schroeder

The American Psychiatric Association's 1973 decision to remmove homosexuality as a mental disorder from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has been folIowed by an era of significant improvements in the sociopolitical standing of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals in the United States. Despite these changes, and perhaps even because of them, a marginal subset of mental hea!th practitioners continues to diagnose and treat individuals with a homosexual orientation as if they were mentally ill. The tools these clinicians have used include - either exclusively or sometimes in combination - psychoanalysis, religious faith healing, aversive behavioral conditioning and even electroshock therapy. While none of these approaches has successfully produced heterosexuality in the majority of patients treated, the practitioners of sexual conversion therapies regard any chance of heterosexual conversion as being worth the effort. Disturbingly, in their therapeutic fervor - if not ideological or religious zeal - to create heterosexuals, reparative or sexual conversion therapists tend to overlook and dismiss any possible harmful side effects of such treatments. In their efforts to save (or recruit?) any potential heterosexual they may encounter, these therapists have appeared almost universally indifferent about inflicting damage upon the self-esteem of those patients who do not become heterosexual and who eventually go on to adopt gay or lesbian identities. In other words, these therapists, and often the larger heterosexual society as weIl, seem not to care how many gay people are hurt in the process of producing a few more heterosexuals. To counterbalance these serious clinical and ethical omissions, this special issue of the Journal of Gay & Lesbian psychotherapy presents current perspectives, both from patients and clinicians, on the harmful impact of sexual orientation conversion interventions.