by Douglas C. Haldeman, Ph.D.

Organized mental health declassified homosexuality as a mental illness more than twenty-five years ago. Those who thought this action would mean the demise of therapies designed to change homosexual orientation have only to look at the events of the past year to realize that some religious political activists and marginalized mental health professionals are seeking to reinstate the "illness" model of homosexuality by peddling the stories of the "cured" to the American public.

As a result of a high-profile advertising campaign promoting treatments for unwanted homosexual orientation, the term "reparative therapy" has become widespread. This term inaccurately implies "broken-ness" as the distinctive feature of homosexuality and bisexuality, however. Since mainstream mental health organizations have rejected this position, the more accurate term for therapeutic efforts to change homosexual orientation is sexual orientation conversion therapy, or simply, conversion therapy.

The promotion of reparative or conversion therapy goes beyond its obvious market of disaffected lesbian, gay and bisexual people. This campaign attempts to influence public opinion and justify anti-gay discrimination by inaccurately portraying homosexuality as a mental disorder and a social evil. Conversion therapy, then, is more than just a clinical issue. It figures prominently in the national debate over lesbian and gay civil rights.

To show why conversion therapy should not influence the development of public policy, this analysis will address several issues:

• Conversion therapy is based on faulty assumptions.
• Homophobia leads some individuals to seek sexual orientation change.
• The mental health professions generally oppose conversion therapy.
• No reliable evidence supports the effectiveness of conversion treatments.
• Conversion therapy can be harmful.
• Conversion therapy adversely affects the public's views of lesbian, gay and bisexual people.

The Faulty Theoretical Foundations of Conversion Therapy
Psychology and psychiatry have no precedents for treating conditions that are not considered to be illnesses. Since 1973 homosexuality has been considered a normal variation of human sexuality. Proponents of conversion therapy disregard this view because of their mistaken belief that homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness only after lobbying from gay activists. The truth, however, rests in the science, or lack thereof, of the "mental illness" assumption of homosexuality.

Homosexuality itself became a mental health diagnosis only as a reflection of prevailing social prejudice. This assumption was first questioned by Evelyn Hooker¹ , who compared matched groups of homosexually- and heterosexually-identified men. She found that scores from psychological tests of the two groups were indistinguishable from one another. Since then, a substantial scientific literature has found no significant differences between homosexual and heterosexual subjects on measures of overall psychological functioning and mental and emotional well-being. The most comprehensive review of such studies was conducted by Gonsiorek, who also carefully analyzed studies purporting to demonstrate that homosexuality is a mental illness and found them to be rife with methodological problems.²

Conversion therapy is based upon the notion that homosexuality is a mental illness and/or a destructive element in society. Theorists such as Nicolosi and Socarides maintain that homosexuals suffer from an arrest of normal development³ . According to their theories, if the circumstances of childhood attachment can be reproduced in therapy, the patient will supposedly overcome his or her homosexuality. Such theories have been described for decades. They have never been empirically validated, however. The theories are concocted from the experiences of unhappy homosexual psychotherapy patients and bear little resemblance to the lives of most lesbian and gay people.

Next Page | 1, 2, 3, 4