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Early treatments in the 1960s and 70s included aversion therapy, such as shocking patients or giving them nausea-inducing drugs while showing them same-sex erotica, according to a 2004 article in the British Medical Journal.

Other methods included psychoanalysis or talk therapy, estrogen treatments to reduce libido in men, and even electroconvulsive therapy, in which an electric shock is used to induce a seizure, with side effects such as memory loss.

The bill was signed into law in September 2013. She was previously a senior writer for Live Science but is now a freelancer based in Denver, Colorado, and regularly contributes to Scientific American and The Monitor, the monthly magazine of the American Psychological Association. The participants continued to report same-sex attractions after the conversion therapy, and were not significantly more attracted to the opposite gender.

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These studies did find that conversion therapy could be harmful, however.

That was all I wanted back then.

5 Surprising Facts About Gay Conversion Therapy

Gay Therapy

Gay conversion therapy, as it is known, supposedly helps gay people overcome same-sex attractions. It didn’t work.

One of the most prominent advocates of conversion therapy in the 1940s and 50s was Edmund Bergler, who saw homosexuality as a perversion and believed he could "cure" gay people with a punishment-based, confrontational therapy style.

Once the American Psychiatric Association stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973, conversion therapies lost support.

The first is a civil suit in New Jersey in which four former clients of a counseling group called Jonah are suing for deceptive practices. But I focused intently on his words: “So, your mother worked, you say?" I nodded. Because it is now understood that sexual orientation is not a choice or something that can be changed, so-called conversion therapy—sometimes called reparative therapy, ex-gay therapy, or sexual reorientation therapy—is not only ineffective, it is often actively harmful.

Why is that?” I gritted my teeth in response and stayed silent.

I was always terrified before each session as I trudged up the stairs to his office - nervous someone might see me and realise why I was there. But mainstream psychologists say the therapy is ineffective, unethical and often harmful, exacerbating anxiety and self-hatred among those treated for what is not a mental disorder.

In 2013, two cases involving the therapy to convert gay people into heterosexuals hit the courts, with one seeking to sue counselors who offer the therapy and the other seeking to defend them.

Here are five things you need to know about the therapy and the current lawsuits.

Why psychologists say conversion therapy doesn't work

Homosexuality is not considered a mental disorder, so the American Psychological Association (APA) does not recommend "curing" same-sex attraction in any case.

Instead, I was in the throes of the gay conversion therapy that would dominate my early 20s and leave me forever changed.

I was convinced then that I had to be straight to be happy. What’s more, LGBTQ-affirmative therapy—which validates the identities of sexual- and gender-diverse clients—has become increasingly available as societal acceptance of LGBTQ+ identities has become more widespread.

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Stephanie received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of South Carolina and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. 

Conversion therapy is a pseudoscientific and discredited practice that attempts to force LGBTQ+ individuals to change their sexual orientation or gender identity and instead identify as heterosexual or cisgender.

The group has religious links; for example, one of its founders and former president, psychologist Joseph Nicolosi, is a one-time spokesman for Focus on the Family. He nodded and then started asking me to analyse why I felt that sense of anxious excitement. One of the stranger attempts was an effort by Viennese endocrinologist Eugen Steinach to transplant testicles from straight men into the scrotums of gay men in an attempt to rid them of same-sex desires.

He offered to see the woman anyway, but later broke off the therapy due to her hostility. That was followed by, “You must feel anxious around boys. Conservative groups were delighted to have support from Spitzer, who wasn't tainted with religious bias or anti-gay ideology; gay organizations felt betrayed.

In the end, however, Spitzer came to agree with his critics.

Perhaps my inability to feel attracted to men was because I was actually worried they didn’t like me, he suggested.

I sighed. Naively, I thought the pain of picking apart my childhood and subjecting my parents to scrutiny was worth it because, I believed, I was going to come out the other side as a straight woman. The patients argue they paid thousands of dollars for therapies that did not rid them of same-sex attractions, and that they then had to pay for mainstream therapy to repair the damage done by the conversion therapy.

gay to straight adapter

[5 Myths About Gay People Debunked]

In a second case in California, a federal judge is hearing arguments against a new state law that bans conversion therapy for minors. In 1935, Freud went even further, writing to a woman who wanted her homosexual son converted that homosexuality "is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness."

Other psychologists throughout the early mid-1900s believed homosexuality could be changed and recommended a variety of treatments.