Vancouver, Canada, Bans Conversion Therapy

On June 6, 2018, City Council in my hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia, unanimously approved a motion to ban conversion therapy in the city limits, making Vancouver the first city in Canada to pass such a law. I was one of three speakers who appeared in-chambers and addressed Council in support of this ban. In five brief minutes I detailed my history with this “therapy” and my reasons for approaching the city’s LGBTQ2+ Advisory Committee in 2017 with a recommendation for some kind of public statement denouncing these treatments, or better yet, an outright ban. I was thrilled when the Committee invited me to help them draft the motion that was later approved and submitted to Council for consideration. “Conversion therapy is a problem of ideology,” I told Council on June 6, “not nationality”—so Canada must do its own part in preventing these treatments from continuing. Legal bans are an important step forward.

I have written elsewhere about my frustration around the city’s delay in considering this ban, but I have to say how proud I felt when several Councillors voiced their shock that these “pseudo-scientific therapies” are continuing at all, with anyone, anywhere. When I first approached the Committee last year, I had sincerely hoped a ban in Vancouver would be for all, adults and minors alike, since experience has taught me that even adults can fall prey to these forms of institutionalized hatred, which are every bit as harmful no matter what the person’s age. I was disappointed to learn, only a few days before Council’s meeting, that the motion had been rewritten to cover only minors, although, again, the fact that the motion was even being advanced seemed promising. All this to say that when one Councillor suddenly introduced an amendment so that the motion would ban conversion therapy “outright”—not only for minors but also for adults—I almost burst into tears. “This is a fraudulent practice,” another Councillor stated. “Not only is it cruel and dangerous, it’s fraudulent, so legally, we should be fine in preventing it happening to anyone.” At no time during the two-year complaint against my former psychiatrist through the College of Physicians and Surgeons, nor the four-year medical malpractice suit I filed against the doctor, did I feel so vindicated as when I heard these Councillors voice this kind of unequivocal support.

The City’s motion on conversion therapy is available to view on-line (personal remarks begin at 11:11). Maclean’s published my Op-Ed on the topic that same day. PBS NewsHour covered the story, as did CBC, 1130 News, The Georgia Straight, and The Star Vancouver (among others).

When people talk to me about “moving on” in life and “not looking back,” I often wonder if what they’re really saying is they want me to be happy, and they just don’t know how I could ever be happy when past trauma, like with what I experienced in this treatment, still seems to impact my life today. Their comments seem to suggest that I am perpetuating the trauma by facing it square-on—talking or writing about it continuously—rather than by turning away in an attempt to save myself more suffering, “the memory of it all.” I understand these sentiments. I think we all, on some level, simply want to be happy. No one chooses to be traumatized; but when our bodies and internal sense of self are violated, shattered seemingly beyond repair as a result of some kind of incommensurable trauma, and struggling afterward even with the daily tasks of shopping, cooking, and feeding ourselves, not to mention holding down a job and caring for loved ones—when faced with the very real impact and devastation of trauma on our daily lives, I really do believe that conscious recognition of what we’ve lived through and survived helps us to heal. The act of “healing,” of course, is ongoing; there will likely never come one final moment when we return to who we were “before.” Healing is a deliberate act of agency; we may need to nurse ourselves to this end in perpetuity. We certainly do not heal by turning away and betraying our past, but, I think, by embracing, with compassion, what we’ve survived. When we see ourselves, wholly, we recognize others; when we’re blind to our own suffering, anyone else’s becomes intolerable.

To be heard and recognized by our government officials is a deeply meaningful, and healing, experience.

The Lie of Mental Illness

The decades-old medical model of mental health says that “you” and “I” are unrelated, and that if a health expert diagnoses “you” with a mental illness—as being “mentally ill”—that has nothing to do with “me.” One of us is well, the other unwell.

Biology is the culprit, this model says; a person’s DNA has “caused” their mental illness. Unfortunately, this also often means that these “illnesses” will “run in the family”—a person has likely “inherited” the “mental illness” of their ancestor. We are the victims of our biology.

All hope is not lost, however, because treatment is available for this “ill” person. Diagnosis is crucial, of course, by way of The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), since only by naming the illness can experts then enact the remedy through psychopharmacology. The best anyone can ever do is to understand their mental health concern—the name of what they “have”—then take their medication.

I do not believe in the medical model of mental health. It frightens me; it reminds me too much of my own experience as a gay man who was medicalized by a system of so-called “experts” all hell bent on diagnostic criteria, then drugging my sexuality away with extreme psychiatric medication. To me, there is little difference in what is happening today with the diagnosis of, oh, let’s say, “ADHD,” and psychiatry’s diagnosis of my own “illness” as a gay man. What has changed, in the years since homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1973—from a moment in time when the guardians of the gate of mental health “decided” by popular vote that gays were no longer mentally ill—is psychiatry’s influx of “diseases,” as all neatly categorized in the DSM, and their remedies in the form of an over-saturation of psychopharmacology—but the methods of diagnosis (i.e. labelling), treatment, policing and evaluation, has remained consistent.

“Mad in America” is a non-profit organization devoted to “rethinking psychiatric care in the United States and abroad,” which includes publishing an online webzine with “news of psychiatric research, original journalism,” and a forum a international writers—“people with lived experience,” among them, psychologists and psychiatrists. Lawrence Kelmenson, MD, a psychiatrist, begins one such recent article by writing that, “As modern psychiatry grows larger and larger, it becomes hungrier and hungrier for more clients. Its formula is to invent fake ‘illnesses’ that everyone meets criteria for, and to lure people to seek fake ‘cures’ that really make them permanently ‘ill.’ But there is a more pervasive, ominous, and subtle way that U.S. adoption of the medical model has spread ‘mental illness’ and drug addiction.”

“Mental illness,” I really do believe, has fast become the cancer of the new Millennium, and we are all at risk of being labelled “sick” because, not unlike physical diseases, mental illness also springs from our genes, attacking us in its infancy.

No longer do people feel “sad” or “depressed”—now they are all “mentally ill”; they are “bipolar.” To even admit to feeling “blue” shows signs of heredity. “Are you taking anything for it?” has become a question that I have heard all too often. Just recently, I ran into a writing friend in a local grocery store, and after telling her that I’d been feeling “a bit depressed”—following years of receiving literally hundreds of rejections on my memoir manuscript (some quite scathing in their comments), to finally getting it published (to my rejoice), but now experiencing the “down” effect on this seemingly endless roller coaster ride called Book Publication—she asked me if I was “taking anything for it.” For a moment I just stared at her, gobsmacked. She has to be kidding, I thought. “I’m on a great new antidepressant,” she said. “You should take it.”

Why should I take it? was the question that plagued me, as I left my friend in the frozen food section. What is wrong with feeling sad, or depressed? It is normal to feel the way I feel, after going through what I’ve gone through.

Why didn’t my friend ask me, instead, more about how I was experiencing this depression? As depth psychology has shown us, aside from a kind of depression that is driven by biological sources, which no doubt does affect a certain amount of people, there are all sorts of other reactive depressions that are the natural result of complex life situations—acute traumas, the passing of loved ones, prolonged illnesses, or any number of other events. Probing questions about such occurrences, how they affect us emotionally and the ways in which we face deep personal troubles and crises, seem to have been largely replaced with advice about “which medication to take.” Mental illness, like an omniscient third person, is now the culprit.

In his The New York Times’Op-Ed, published May 11, 2012, Allen Frances, former chairman of the psychiatry department at Duke University School of Medicine, and leader of the task force that produced the most recent DSM in 2013, wrote that The American Psychiatric Association has come dangerously close to turning “the existential worries and sadness of everyday life into an alleged mental disorder . . . The DSM has become the arbiter of who is ill and who is not . . . The DSM-5 promises to be a disaster . . . it will introduce many new and unproven diagnoses that will medicalize normality and result in a glut of unnecessary and harmful drug prescription . . .”

Our conversations, I fear, are already being reshaped by the “new normalcy” of mental illness. People seem less and less inclined to ask the “old” questions about feelings. As future generations come of age, they obviously won’t even have the frame of reference to remember that there was a time, in the not-too-distant-past, before the world of “mental illness” and its psychopharmacological cures, when the remedy to feeling “down” was human relationships. People actually talked about their feelings—and not on-line but face-to-face; they sharedstories, and hugged, and the simple but palpable recognition that what is in me is also in you, actually helped. When you don’t even remember anymore that there are other questions that can be asked, what happens then?

It frightens me to think that it’s all just a matter of being easier to talk about “mental illness” and psychopharmacology, than real human feeling. And not just to talk about feelings, but in between all our texting and emailing, to actually feel them. Perhaps we’ve become a lazy culture, generation upon generation, with talk of this diagnosis or that diagnosis, this drug or that drug—even this side effect or that side effect (and which drug will help with the side effects resulting from the other medications) becoming so much easier and black-and-white, than the murky waters of our complicated emotions.

But being alive is not a black-and-white affair, and neither should it be. Feelings are not Conservative or Liberal, GOP or Democrat. Struggling through emotions is, at least in part, what it means to be alive. Psychopharmacology, I’m convinced, is robbing us of our humanity. Agency has been replaced with the prescription pad.

Meanwhile, I sometimes wonder about all these mass shootings, their alarming increased rate of frequency, the role that this mental health + psychopharmacology paradigm has perhaps played in these killers’ actions. I also do not think there is any accident to our culture’s increased fixation on “torture porn”—graphically violent films that are also often laced with sexual brutality. An industry plagued with controversy over sexual impropriety (to put it mildly) produces fodder to their masses, then stands back bewildered, along with everyone else, when violence erupts. How can a movie like Jigsaw actually earn close to 20 million dollars in just one weekend? I thought recently. How is it possible that this kind of inhumanity is considered “entertainment”? Even the mere idea depresses me. In considering these “torture porns,” I remember the more benign horror movies of my adolescence, like John Carpenter’s Halloween or even Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist, with mild nostalgia. At the same time, I can also see how the ante has been seriously “upped”—it needs to be upped. There is no end to the well of human misery, and what we no longer feel must always be increased to penetrate our deadening senses. What we will not face, we will project, I keep thinking, as I witness depictions of extreme violence in our media; and I suppose that also means that what we medicate away will sooner or later show up by some other means through our projections on the screens of our lives. We need to see it outside, because we will not look at it within. 

Medicating it away—whatever “it” is—does not mean that it has gone away. I fear that this will all get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

From Plan A to Plan D: Stop Having Sex

During a recent media interview about conversion therapy, the reporter I was speaking with on the phone cited a known religious “ex-gay” organization operating out of Vancouver, Canada, where I live, and said that its leader claimed they were “not practicing conversion therapy,” but merely “helping homosexuals to not have sex,” to “remain celibate.” The reporter then asked me what I thought about this statement.

I’ll admit that in the moment, I had trouble articulating my full horror. Nevertheless, I told the reporter what I know to be true, which is that few, if any, organizations today would even admit to practicing “conversion therapy,” so in this sense it was not surprising to me that they would deny practicing what is now considered to be a universally debunked form of “therapy” to change sexual orientation. My former psychiatrist would have never admitted to practicing “conversion therapy” on me throughout my own six years of “therapy,” yet that is precisely what he was doing.

“Conversion therapies,” I know from experience, occur across a spectrum of experiences, and can range from electric shock treatment and aversion therapy, to the more benign “talking therapy,” and all of them outwardly geared toward “changing” sexual orientation—though even this language obfuscates their real intent, since in truth they are technically less about “changing sexual orientation” than they are about “stopping homosexuality” (do they ever try and “change” heterosexuality to homosexuality?). Thrown into the mix by many religious “ex-gay” organizations is an effort to try and realign a person’s apparent “gender confusion” in order for them to live “according to scripture” (males being masculine; females being feminine; both sexes coupling only in heterosexual marriages). The magic (toxic) ingredient in all of these “treatments,” whether one wants to call them conversion therapies or not, is shame. Shame about one’s homosexuality or gender identity is what leads people (or causes parents to send their kids) to these treatments; shame is what imprisons them.

With the demise of Exodus International, the world’s largest “ex-gay” organization, and virtually every leading medical and mental health organization now denouncing all forms of conversion therapy, many of these organizations have subsequently reframed their methods from claiming to “change” sexual orientation to the softer but (in my opinion) no less onerous “helping homosexuals to not have sex.” Nomenclature changes; shame remains.

Helping anyone to not have sex specifically because they are gay is not the same as not having sex because, oh, let’s say, a person chooses to not engage with anyone on a sexual level, gay or straight. At various times in my own adult life (er, during my post-conversion therapy years) I have remained celibate—or maybe just single with no sex—because I chose to focus my energies elsewhere (or I just couldn’t deal with the whole “dating scene”). But at no time during any of these times has my choice to not have sex been precipitated by the belief that to be gay or homosexual is a sin and I should therefore not act on those desires—that I should “love the sinner” (myself), but “hate the sin” (sex with other men). Shame was never driving my choices.

I have never heard of any organization that “helps heterosexuals to not have sex” specifically because their “heterosexual sex” was immoral. Hiding behind the religious veneer of “no sex before marriage” never cut it for me either. Recent same-sex marriage laws have obviously complicated many religious arguments, since previously they would have simply forbidden “sex outside marriage,” therefore de facto precluding all gays from having sex. Now that gays can marry in Canada and the U.S. and in many other countries, forbidding sex outside marriage no longer necessary prevents or precludes gays from having sex—they can simply first marry. But that doesn’t solve the “religious problem.” What to do about all that “gay sex”?

No longer strapping gay people into chairs and shocking them with electricity but merely “helping” them to not have sex may sound like progress, it may no longer sound like conversion therapy, and therein lies the rub. Looking for something called “conversion therapy,” or that anyone admits to being called “conversion therapy,” will always shield the culprit. When we talk about conversion therapy we are talking about an ideology, not any one “type” of treatment. All of these scenarios, and more, are bound by the same awful shame, and the same shameful ideology, which says that being gay is a sin or disease (abnormality, error, etc.) and should be “changed,” or at least not acted on. In other words, if you can’t change ’em, at least make sure they stop having sex.

Sexual Abuse ≠ Gay

I’ll never forget a dinner I had with my family, in 2001. We were all—siblings, spouses, and my parents—at a swanky downtown restaurant in honour of my parents’ 45th wedding anniversary. After a few glasses of very expensive red wine, I leaned over and I asked my sister-in-law sitting next to me if she’d ever considered the possibility that one of her two sons, both of whom were under 10 at the time, might turn out gay. Without so much as blinking she told me that she knew they weren’t gay because they’d never been sexually abused. Her words really shook me, because it struck me that this was the exact same logic—ideologically insular, pointing to nothing in the real world that validated its flawed argument—that had led me right into the hands of a sociopathic psychiatrist and his plan to "change" me from gay to straight while I was in my 20's and early 30's. According to this licensed doctor, since sexual abuse had "made" me gay, healing the trauma of the abuse would inevitably revert me to my underlying "base heterosexuality."

But at this dinner in 2001, already six years out of that "therapy," I questioned my sister-in-law's logic. And in response she asked me, clearly rhetorically, if I had ever been sexually abused (by this time she, and everyone in my family, knew that I'd been abused). I told her I didn’t think the abuse had "made me gay." She looked genuinely surprised. What about all the gay people who have never been sexually abused? I said. What about all the straight people who have been abused? She herself had been sexually abused as a child—a fact we had all known for years. But none of that mattered. None of that seemed to factor into her argument. She remained convinced that sexual abuse caused a person to be gay. I left the restaurant in disbelief, angry and really saddened, reminded of all the years that I had believed this lie about myself, what I’d done to myself as a result of that lie. So many years of suffering.

It was easy, as a confused teenager, to think that sexual abuse from my childhood had "made me gay." I was raised in the 1970's to believe that Homosexuals Recruited Children. Anita Bryant's voice prevailed. The one and only time my mother and I talked about the sexual abuse was when she told me, I think I was 11 or 12 at the time, that dirty old men kidnapped little children and made them do really bad things that turned them toward a life of perversity. We were in the kitchen, sitting at our blue metal Arborite table next to the window. What could I say? She stared at me. Her words freaked me out, because they seemed to come with a dire threat or warning: beware what you've become. 

Despite much progress and education, I still see glimpses of this old lie slipping through the cracks of our current culture. Many right wing zealots and ideological liemongers, which of course includes the likes of Anne Coulter, often do point to a history of sexual abuse as the "reason" why some "choose homosexuality" (interestingly, they never mention all the straight men who've been sexually abused). But it's not only the right wingers. Gay men silence themselves. Years ago, after my six years in this "conversion therapy," for a short time I was employed as a gay outreach worker, where I met literally hundreds of men ("Men Who Have Sex With Men," we were told to call them) who confided in me that they had a history of sexual abuse, but that they'd never told anyone because of their fear that they'd be told the abuse had "made" them gay. This, to me, is tragic. Voices of distress: snuffed out, and all because of the fear of intolerance and ignorance. What happens to all that suffering, when it turns back into the soul of a human being? Where does it go? In the case of a lot of the gay male survivors that I met, that very suffering turned into sexual addiction: using the compulsive behaviour—which, to at least some degree, was the result of the abuse—as fodder to engage in even greater acts of self-flagelation. It does not help that gay culture often reinforces some version of the belief that More Sex is Always Good Sex. Sex, for many gay men, may still be a political act of resisting oppression (which I would applaud), but in the case of survivors of sexual abuse, more sex is not always necessarily good sex.

All abuse survivors struggle, at one point or another, with whether or not to disclose their history of abuse to anyone, and yet I doubt very much that straight men worry that their abuse "made" them straight. They likely do not confuse or conflate their attraction for women with having been sexually abused.

One argument that I've heard repeatedly expressed against the proposed legal bans on "conversion therapy" is that outlawing these "therapies" would dissuade licensed therapists from freely exploring various issues of sexuality with their patients—take for example, a history of sexual abuse. Lawmakers, these arguments profess, do not have the right to intercede on what amounts to very complicated and complex therapeutic relationships. 

This is an ironic position to take, considering that, by their very definition, "conversion therapies" aim to "change" a person's sexuality to the desired outcome of heterosexuality, or at least to guide them in one direction only. Throughout my own six years of "therapy," my former psychiatrist's goal became to "guide" me toward my "innate heterosexuality." "Primal doesn't lie," he'd say, after my regressions on the mattress where I'd talk (scream) about "hating homosexuals," or "hating gay sex." My own words "proved" that I really was straight, he'd tell me afterward, which did nothing but confuse me even more. Of course, we never discussed the fact that I'd grown up learning to hate, and fear, homosexuals, and by extension: myself. We never discussed that I'd gown up being taught that sexual abuse "made" homosexuals, and that, by extension, I'd learned to hate my own flesh. How can you not hate yourself, body, mind, and soul, when your most primal urges are the result of sexual violence? How could I not Hate Myself when these were the Lessons Of My Youth?

Learning to love oneself is not easy, because often it can mean unlearning a lot of what we've been taught to believe about ourselves, even from people we dearly love, then starting again.

Waiting for Laws

Writing a blog scares me. I can't stand the feeling of pressure, writing a new blog once a day, or once a week, even every other week. I'm a single guy and, like most writers, I work a full-time job, plus I need to shop and I like to cook; exercise; walk a lot; read books; do my laundry and iron all my clothes every week, especially my bedding; see and cook for my elderly mother; and then there's my first book that was just published and I'm trying to still pitch interviews, and reviews, and of course I'm writing a new book. Who has time to write a blog?

But then I lie in my lavender-scented Epsom salt bubble bath to try and relax, to try and not think about all the things I don't have time to write about in a blog. 

Like laws banning "conversion therapy." Canada's banned it in two provinces, Ontario and Manitoba, except that in Manitoba it's not really a ban so much as a health regulation, deterring licensed therapists from practicing "conversion therapy." Does anyone actually think a licensed therapist who wants to practice "conversion therapy" is going to admit to practicing "conversion therapy"? Or even bill the province for "conversion therapy"? Please. A "regulation" like this is less than ineffective; in my mind, it's an insult. I understand Alberta's Lethbridge Public Interest Research Group, a "student-funded, student-directed, not-for-profit organization" is now spearheading a movement to ban the practice in their own province, but even there I understand they're meeting opposition from lawmakers with remarks that "conversion therapy doesn't happen in Alberta."

Oh, really?

Since my own six years in a form of "conversion therapy" in my native British Columbia, I've approached a number of politicians to try and bring about a law or even a public statement, just something, opposing this form of torture. Granted, the first time I approached a sitting MLA (Member of Legislative Assembly) in my West End neighbourhood of Vancouver, I was in the middle of suing my former psychiatrist for the treatment, so it was probably not the best time. Still, I'd hardly made it through the MLA's front office door and explained my history with this doctor when I was told, point blank, that they could not help me. Did I mention the MLA was a gay man? 

Flash forward, and about six years ago I approached the new MLA, again in my West End neighbourhood, once again explaining that I'd lived through six years of "conversion therapy" in British Columbia, that I'd filed an ethics complaint against the doctor with BC's College of Physicians and Surgeons, that I'd even sued the doctor, and had spent the last (at that time) roughly 15 years working on a book about the whole ordeal. I was approaching him, the MLA, now, I said, in the hope of sponsoring a private members bill, banning the practice of conversion therapy in British Columbia. 

At first, he seemed genuinely interested; he thanked me for bringing this "very serious community issue" to his attention; he told me that we'd meet again. Weeks later, I called and he said he had no time to help, but that if I did some "research" on my own, I could send it to him by email and he'd "look into it." Oh, did I mention he was also a gay man?

Then this year, in 2017, in anticipation of my book's release, I approached the city of Vancouver's LGBTQ2+ committee, which is tasked with making recommendations to the City of Vancouver about issues affecting Vancouver's LGBTQ community. I asked them to consider recommending to the City that they take a public position against "conversion therapy"--not even banning the practice legally, just simply taking a public position against the practice.

I waited months, but heard nothing. Then one day, I spotted a City Counsellor in my neighbourhood grocery store. Without thinking (or else I'm sure I would have shrunk back in fear), I approached him, introduced myself, told him about my email to the City's LGBTQ2+ Committee, and what I'd proposed. To which he said he knew all about my email already. We chatted next to the cucumbers, I think. He told me he knew of several "religious conversion therapies" that were happening right here in British Columbia. "They're a menace to our community," he said. "They're crazy." He seemed to know much more about these "therapies" than I did. He handed me his business card. He told me to follow up with the Committee. Oh, did I mention he is also a gay man?

I followed up with the Committee again, weeks later. I cc'd the City Counsellor.

Finally, six weeks later, they invited me to their next meeting, six weeks after that. I prepared a briefing note about "conversion therapy" in Canada, and in British Columbia, and my own history with the therapy, even detailing all the laws that have been passed banning the practice in various U.S. states and cities. There was precedent to my proposal.

At the meeting, I talked for a good 40 minutes, answered questions; everyone seemed very nice and eager to Stop. The. Big. Bad. Wolf. of Conversion Therapy. Some of the Committee members hadn't even been born when I was in my own therapy. I'm not sure how I felt about that, but I felt old.

I left, then heard nothing. Weeks passed. I emailed again, thanked them for inviting me to the meeting, to which they responded and said, "Oh, we were just about to email you. We will follow up with you next week, and invite you to join a sub committee about banning reparative therapy in British Columbia." 

Weeks wore on; now months. Still no word. I don't care anymore. No, that's not true. Yes it is. Not it's not. I don't know anymore. I'm tired, and I'm mad. I can't stand the waiting. I can't wait for politicians, or committees. Bureaucracy makes me crazy. I can't stand trying to make my point that "conversion therapy" is dangerous, that it causes harm, that it hurts people, that it hurt me. I take it all far too personally. The issue is a very personal issue to me. Frankly, I don't know how it is I'm still alive today. The medications that the doctor prescribed to try and "kill" my sexuality (my homosexuality) nearly killed me. I overdosed. I should have died. Thankfully, I didn't die. I'm alive. I try and make a difference. I wrote a book. I spent a very long time writing this book, The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir, to try and "get it right." Maybe someone will read it. Maybe it will help one kid. Maybe one parent will read it and think twice about sending their gay or trans kid into "conversion therapy." I hope so. I really do. That's my prayer.