Gay Conversion Therapies

Debate between Ben Howlett and Mike Freer

Tuesday 3rd November 2015 Westminster Hall

[Mike Freer (Finchley and Golders Green) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered gay conversion therapies and the NHS.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mr Bailey.

I am conscious that this subject has been raised before; however, it remains possible for people in the UK to be referred by a national health service professional to a psychotherapist for gay conversion therapy—the so-called gay cure. Being gay is not a disease, it is not an illness and it is not something that I or any other gay man or woman can be cured of. To suggest otherwise is not only demeaning, but morally and medically wrong. Not a single medical body supports the concept of a gay cure. The Royal College of Psychiatrists, the UK Council for Psychotherapy, the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and the British Medical Association have all concluded that such therapy is unethical and potentially harmful.

Various techniques and methods have been used, and I will list a few to give a bit of colour to the level of quackery available. Exorcism is one method—in The Times today is a story about a young man taken to a backstreet exorcist because his parents were concerned that he was gay. Cycling, too, was thought to be a cure for being gay, although as a keen cyclist I can tell colleagues that it does not work. Then there is prayer—pray away the gay, apparently—although that does not appear to work either. An Austrian doctor trialled testicular transplants: he took the testicles of a heterosexual man and transplanted them into a homosexual man to see whether that curbed his homosexual desires. Unfortunately, I could not find the outcome of the trial anywhere on the internet, although I am sure that it was of interest to both recipient and donor of the testicles.

I mention those as examples of how far from the mainstream some so-called cures can be. They are also a far cry from mainstream psychotherapy—I need to put that on the record. However, I want to focus on current techniques and to debunk the thought that so-called cure therapies might simply be gentle counselling, laying on the couch and talking about one’s feelings. They are not gentle therapies.

Such therapies purport to change a person’s sexual orientation or to reduce attraction to people of the same sex. Dr Christian Jessen, for a television programme in only 2014, underwent treatment for homosexuality, including one of the most extreme cures, aversion therapy, which looks to teach patients to associate same-sex attraction with pain or nausea. Patients are given a drug that makes them extremely ill and they are then played pornographic images and sound recordings while they vomit violently. That is not counselling. Usually patients experience a session every two hours, night and day, for three whole days. That is not counselling. Similarly, in electric-shock treatment, people who respond to same-sex stimuli are shocked so that their response is associated with pain. That is not counselling.

Imagine the outcry if Parliament were to give tacit approval to curing heterosexual men and women of their heterosexuality. There would be uproar. Allowing conversion therapy to try to turn our straight colleagues gay would not last a day, yet we allow therapists to peddle the myth that they can cure people of being gay.

If such views were held only by crackpots on the fringe of society, it would be laughable. It is not. Some psychotherapists and some NHS staff hold the view that a gay cure is possible. YouGov polling in 2014 for Stonewall, the excellent lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender organisation, found that one in 10 health and social care staff have heard other staff express a belief in gay cure therapy; in London that figure rose to one in five. Only six years ago the BMC Psychiatry journal surveyed over 1,300 accredited medical professionals and found that more than 200 of them—over 15%—had offered some form of conversion therapy. Those 200-plus professionals said that 35% of their patients had been referred to them by GPs, and 40% of the patients receiving the so-called treatment were treated in an NHS practice. For any health professional to refer someone for such therapy is fundamentally abhorrent and it is time to call a halt to it once and for all.

Where are we today? In spite of numerous calls for an outright ban, the practice continues, although I accept that there has been some progress. In January, the “Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy in the UK” was launched. It was developed by the UK Council for Psychotherapy and signed up to by some major organisations, including the NHS. It is welcome as far as it goes, but a number of regulators have not yet signed up to the memorandum—and it is voluntary. The memorandum seems to cover only sexual orientation, not gender identity—and it is voluntary. The memorandum states that practitioners need to be aware of the ethical issues relating to such cure therapies and that the public should be made aware of the risks of such therapies—and it is voluntary. The memorandum seeks to apply standards to a sector of therapy that has no statutory regulation—because it is voluntary. We regulate dentists, but we have no statutory regulation for psychotherapists.

My hon. Friend the Minister has an impeccable record on LGBT issues, especially in health, and I put on the record that on this issue and many others she has a deep commitment to helping to eradicate flaws in the system and to pursuing equality. So I have to ask: why we are allowing this abuse, this so-called cure therapy, to continue? Why are we allowing the practitioners, the psychotherapists, to have merely a voluntary code of practice—a memorandum of understanding?

I acknowledge that psychotherapy has a role to play for adults who need support when dealing with a range of issues connected with their sexuality and sexual identity. Dealing with conflicting feelings is difficult at the best of times and I do accept the role of proper, regulated counselling.

[Ben Howlett (Bath) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. Does he agree that availability of such programmes would have a serious effect on the mental health of LGBT individuals?

[Mike Freer]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, given the evidence. I am about to quote the Royal College of Psychiatrists, which states that such therapies are damaging not only to the physical health, but to the mental health of individuals who have such therapies inflicted upon them.