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JOE CREA
Friday, February 25, 2005
A federal official this week denied claims that a division of the Department of Health & Human Services pressured organizers of an upcoming workshop on suicide prevention to omit references to gays from the program.
News reports surfaced last week that officials from the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration had asked the Suicide Prevention Resource Center — the organizer of the conference — to change a workshop title for a regional conference beginning Feb. 28 in Portland, Oregon.
SAMHSA officials reportedly asked workshop coordinators to omit the words “gay,” “lesbian,” “bisexual” and “transgender” from the workshop’s title, “Suicide Prevention Among Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender Individuals,” and use “sexual orientation” instead.
“There was no policy,” said Mark Weber, director of communications for SAMHSA, a unit of HHS responsible for facilitating recovery among those with substance abuse problems or mental illness. “There wasn’t even an issue. As a result, [SPRC] asked if they could restore the original title and it got a bit of attention. It was merely a suggestion.”
Weber also denied claims that SAMHSA Administrator Charlie Curie had declined to attend the event.
“Administrator Curie has always planned on going to the event,” Weber said. “I don’t know where that rumor came from since I do his scheduling.”
A spokesperson for the SPRC, who declined to be named, echoed Weber’s statement, adding that the suggestion about the title change had to do with just one workshop and that there was no discussion about changing the subject matter of the workshop.
The confusion about whether or not Curie would attend the conference resulted from a miscommunication between SPRC and Ron Bloodworth, one of the workshop presenters, officials said.
Bloodworth said he and his co-presenters were pressured by the SPRC to change the title of their conference.
“I was informed that we needed to change the workshop title so it would pass the review process,” Bloodworth said.
Gay Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) got involved in the matter last week and asked Curie for an explanation.
In e-mail exchanges with Frank, Curie said there was no policy or prohibition on the use of the words lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.
“I am still planning to participate in the Oregon Suicide Prevention Conference and I will highlight in my remarks our commitment at SAMHSA to ensure that we reach out to all populations in our efforts to provide substance abuse, prevention, addiction treatment and mental health services,” Curie wrote.
In an e-mail to colleagues on Feb. 14, Bloodworth expressed frustration over the suggestion to change the title of the workshop. He and his fellow presenters agreed to change the title to “Suicide Prevention in Vulnerable Populations” in an effort to maintain the workshop’s standing at the conference.
“We find this behavior on the part of our government intolerable and hope you do too,” Bloodworth wrote. “We have been timid about speaking out for fear that suicide prevention funding would be jeopardized but failure to do so sends a dangerous message of complicity to the decision-makers in government who are responsible for this situation.”
Bloodworth said he hoped that SAMHSA’s clarifications would prevent future problems.
“We do feel some satisfaction and appreciation that the statement Mr. Curie issued as to there not being a policy to using LGBT words in SAMHSA funded issues,” he said. “We hope that this clears up the matter in future such cases.”
Weber said that as a result of the controversy, SAMHSA has received “incredibly negative, hateful e-mails” about the proposed change.
“About 75 percent say, ‘Thank you, we didn’t think this would be true’ and another 25 percent have already made their minds up and are intractable,” Weber said.”
Joe Crea can be reached at jcrea@washblade.com.
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