• the217
• LGBT
• The right kind of treatment

Imagine being told that you are sick and need help. Not sick in the physical sense, but in the mental sense. The way that you live your life is perceived as unhealthy not only by total strangers, but also by the people you’ve grown to love and trust.

The problem then becomes denying the identity someone is most comfortable with, the one that person risked to be open and honest with whom he/she truly is.

What are the right methods for handling or treating something and in what cases can it be damaging to someone? For LGBT youth and adults, there has been a history of trying to treat homosexuality as a mental illness or a sickness ever since the DSMIV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) had classified homosexuality as an illness until 1973 when it was removed.

PinkNews, a news service for the LGBT in the UK, ran an article in 2006 discussing the efforts to treat homosexuality and instances of what was referred to as “prehomosexuality.” There are obviously other articles that will discuss the idea of parents attempting to treat homosexuality, but I thought the article entitled “Parents Offered Anti Gay Therapy for Teens” addressed some key issues on the subject. The so called conversion therapies attempted by Christian groups in areas of Florida with figureheads like Alan Chambers, President of Exodus International, claiming he is living proof that gays can change. Some children as young as five were being put through therapy, and heterosexual students were working in schools to spread the idea that homosexuality was treatable.

Dictating that feelings can’t be natural and that someone must be converted and cured doesn’t best address that person’s needs. Now, of course there are laws and boundaries of behavior which help to keep order and regulate what actions are allowed both justly and unjustly, but such boundaries should be clearly made and as inclusive to the general population as possible.

I don’t want to discredit the choices and opinions of Alan Chambers as they are his own, but if such theories of “curing” someone are what he truly desires, there must be at least credible scientific research supported by the scientific and medical community as a whole without methodological flaws as research director for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute's co-author Jason Cianciotto said. If heterosexuality is what Chambers wants, I’m glad he found what he needed. But in the same notion, what if homosexuality was what was he was being treated for and to live as on the day to day basis.