Oregon Bans 'Conversion Therapy' of LGBTQ Youth

http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2015/05/11/oregon-bans-conversion-therapy-lgbt-youth/

Posted May 11th, 2015
By Nina Liss-Schultz

"Mental health care practitioners in Oregon can no longer try to "convert" LGBTQ youth to heterosexuality, under a law passed last week by the state legislature.

HB 2307, passed by the Democrat-controlled state senate on Friday, will make Oregon the fourth jurisdiction, following California, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C., to ban so-called conversion therapy for minors."

Super glad this passed; it wasn't something I often heard about here but I'm happier knowing it's gone than wondering if it ever existed around these parts. It's more something I could see in rural Oregon, where the beer cans are more plentiful than teeth, but it's good news all the same. 

I don't understand why it isn't banned outright. It's not listed as a best practice by any professional group I'm aware of. It's usually considered the opposite. Adult transgender people can be just as fragile and easily led in this particular area as children would be. Desperation can lead you to any manner of snake-oil.

Quote from: Dee Marshall on May 13, 2015, 02:57:50 PM
I don't understand why it isn't banned outright. It's not listed as a best practice by any professional group I'm aware of. It's usually considered the opposite. Adult transgender people can be just as fragile and easily led in this particular area as children would be. Desperation can lead you to any manner of snake-oil.

Here's my take, Dee. it's just my opinion.

If we ban it outright, it means that no one will EVER be allowed to develop a process that actually does manage to convert people.

Could such a process exist? I can't imagine it would, but there are an awful lot of things I can't imagine. If you asked someone from previous centuries about a lot of modern advances in medicine, it would look like science fiction.

So I'm not ready to say, no one ever will be able to do it successfully.

Would I want it? Heck now, but I'm just one person. There are a lot of people who would want it, and I don't feel comfortable telling them that because of my personal opinion, doctors aren't even allowed to try to do what they want.

No, children should never be used as experimental subjects trying out conversion therapies.

But willing and informed adults are allowed to participate in all sorts of experimental therapies. I would want to preclude that just because I wouldn't want that.

Plenty of therapies get banned. You don't just ban all therapies called "conversion therapy" because you can get around something like that with minor adjustments and a name change. You ban "therapies derived from techniques developed for "brain-washing" including humiliation, sleep deprivation and torture," which happens to describe what we currently know as "conversion therapy". If someone can develop a technique not involving systemic abuse, that doesn't re-direct behaviors into antisocial behavior and self loathing or other mental health issues at a later time then I'm all for it.

The closest real technique I'm aware of is aversion therapy which involves presenting the initial stimulus and pairing it with an aversive stimulus such as odors or electric shock. It's sometimes used for things like smoking but using it is a little dubious and it's rarely effective against complex behaviors. It can cause horrible conflicts when used with a highly desired stimulus such as showing sex scenes involving men to homosexuals. You're basically instilling PTSD.