Zach Stark, a survivor of gay conversion therapy. (Blade file photo)
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JOSHUA LYNSEN
Friday, June 01, 2007
Ten years after it issued a landmark statement on gay patient therapy, the American Psychological Association will revisit the topic.
The organization announced last week it had formed a task force to review current scientific research and stances on “conversion therapy,” or treatment that purports to make gays straight.
Dr. Clinton Anderson, director of the APA’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender concerns office, said the topic remains a contentious one.
“The issue continues to be one of considerable controversy and there’s a lot of public and media attention to it,” he said. “For those reasons, we decided it would make sense to take a look at that new literature and new policies and see if the APA should revise its own policy.”
When the APA last considered the issue in 1997, it said that gay youth and adults should not be labeled mentally ill solely “due to their sexual orientation.”
It also said that psychologists should use “accurate information” and “appropriate interventions” when treating gay patients.
Psychologists and gay rights activists welcomed the APA’s decision to revisit the issue.
“I think it’s going to put a lot of pressure on the right-wing, ex-gay therapies to professionalize what they’re doing, or get out of the business,” said Wayne Besen, gay rights activist and founder of Truth Wins Out, an anti-ex-gay organization.
The task force’s report, due sometime in 2008 or beyond, could offer definitive advice on gay patient therapy when released.
“This is the APA,” said Jim Kennedy, a social psychologist and APA member who lives in Rockville, Md. “When they make a statement, everybody listens to it. Everybody will be aware.”
Youth, adult topics split
Anderson, who is gay, said task force members would study separately the effects of conversion therapy on youth and adults.
He said the task force’s review of youth topics would focus on two key issues.
“One of the crucial issues is going to be around treating children or adolescents at the request of their parents when the child or the adolescent, him or herself, might not want the treatment,” he said. “I think that’s one issue that was sort of raised by the case of that young man in Tennessee.”
In 2005, Zach Stark attracted national media attention when the gay 16-year-old blogged his fears of being sent to Love in Action, a Tennessee facility that worked to change his sexual orientation. Stark eventually was released from the facility.
“The other issue is, I think, the overlap of the concerns about gender presentation and expression in childhood and sexual orientation development,” Anderson said. “There has been some research that has indicated that for some people, a gender incongruity in behavior in childhood is a good predictor of their being gay or lesbian in adulthood.”
He said mental health professionals disagree how to best treat such children.
“There are people in the field who say that children should be supported in their sense of themselves,” Anderson said, “and there are other people who say it’s appropriate to try to reduce the gender, you know, the transgender tendencies of children.”
Kennedy, who is straight but advocates on gay issues, said the APA must resolve this and similar disputes.
“There’s a place here for an authoritative decision to be made,” he said, “an authoritative statement that will give parents and some pediatricians some guidance about what the appropriate approach here is.”
In its review of adult topics, Anderson said the task force would consider religious influences.
“It seems to me the main issues or concerns for adults are around religious commitments or beliefs on the part of adults that are motivating their wish to change their sexual orientation,” he said. “That seems to me to be where most of the issues are bound up.”
Kennedy said the task force must handle such a sensitive topic with caution and care.
“I sympathize with a guy who is a member of a religion that doesn’t approve of his sexual orientation and needs to resolve that,” he said. “That is a real dilemma.”
Policy could stand, change
Anderson said the task force, which will make a preliminary and confidential report to the APA board in December, is not bound to recommend any policy changes.
He said the task force’s six members could let stand the existing APA policy — or they could completely rewrite it.
“That is certainly part of their mandate, to propose whatever they think is appropriate,” Anderson said, “and that could be a completely new statement.”
But Regina Griggs, executive director of Parents & Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays, said that discretion wrongly empowers a task force that appears biased against ex-gays.
She noted that all task force members were reviewed by the APA’s committee on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender concerns, and some are openly gay.
“If it’s fair and balanced, I just don’t see it,” Griggs said. “I’m looking at it as a layperson and I’m just confused. It’s not an evenly balanced committee at all.”
Kennedy, however, said it’s doubtful the task force will ask the APA to “come out with a statement that everybody should embrace their gay identity.”
He said the task force is likelier to “move inclusiveness forward one small step” and take a stronger stand against conversion therapy.
“So if someone goes to psychotherapy, I would hope the therapist would take the approach of making them more comfortable with who they are, because from everything that I can learn about this, it looks like your sexual orientation is not going to change,” Kennedy said.
“You know, you can deny it, you can pretend, but it’s not really going to change. And it seems to me wrong — how do I say this — to forbid some people from having love in their lives.”
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