In the 1900s many sought out treatment for their friends, children, family members for homosexuality, but psychiatry and medicine didn’t universally see it has a mental illness. Prominent psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote a letter to a mother who sought treatment for her gay son. Unfortunately this view would soon change in the 1940s after Frued’s death. Other psychoanalysts such as Sandor Rado criticized Freud’s views. He deemed homosexuality as unnatural and ultimately going against nature. Other psychoanalysts began to follow such as Irving Beiber in 1962 who believed the cause was from a distant father and overbearing mother. These new theories introduced a number of “Gay conversion therapies” in which the goal was to reduce homosexual behavior and increase heterosexual behavior. Homosexuals could be involuntarily committed to psychiatric facilities by their families. They were subject to a number of practices such as castration, aversion therapy. This included taking nausea inducing drugs while watching same sex erotica so they associate nausea with same sex desires, or electroshock while watching the erotica. Other practices included lobotomies where a pick like instrument was inserted through the eye socket and into the brain. Patients were often left severely disabled. Now, all while this was happening there was growing amount of research that countered the theory of homosexuality as pathology. Researchers found homosexual behavior occurring naturally in a percentage of animals. Also, the research used for the support of conversion therapy concluded homosexuals to have greater psychological disturbances compared to heterosexuals. A problem with those studies were the biases in the population. The participants recruited for those studies were from prison. Evelyn Hooker found no difference in psychological disturbances between straight and gay men, when her study sampled men that weren’t in prison. This resulted in a split from the psychological community. Many groups who advocated for keeping “Homosexuality” as a mental disorder split and formed small groups such as NARTH, EXODUS and JONAH, continuing conversion therapy. The years following led to many legal battles and some of these organizations shutting down. In Michael Ferguson vs. Jonah, the New Jersey civil court was sued for deceptive practices. Some patients claimed the therapy not to work, reporting they were still attracted to the same sex. They also had to pay for mainstream therapy for the damages done in conversion therapy. Conservative groups in Welch v. Brown (ban of therapy in CA) fought against the ban of conversion therapy saying that it is a violation of free speech, freedom of religion, and privacy. Today, the law bans conversion therapy for minors in 5 states: California, Oregon, Illinois, Vermont, New Jersey, (and D.C). 45 states have no laws on conversion therapy. New York is also included on this list. Last Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6lLi8TPS38 Subscribe: www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=designingdonna Twitter: twitter.com/designingdonna Instagram: www.instagram.com/psychirl/ Sources: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4695779/ www.aglp.org/gap/1_history/ www.livescience.com/38987-gay-conversion-therapy-facts.html www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/just-the-facts.aspx psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/facts_mental_health.html www.huffingtonpost.com/jamie-scot/shock-the-gay-away-secrets-of-early-gay-aversion-therapy-revealed_b_3497435.html www.josephnicolosi.com/ www.pbs.org/empires/thegreeks/background/19a_p1.html www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/least-one-state-still-enforcing-its-anti-sodomy-law/312798/ www.telcomhistory.org/operators.shtml Videos: Robert Spitzer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIifMxPcRnI Anti-Gay Lecture: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltDZWQKNrCA Anti-Gay Lecture #2: www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_NAl4AkmjU Early Electro Convulsive Therapy: www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_T7WbjcOTA Vice: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw1_oxgtncM&t=163s

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