Ex-gay proponents make my skin crawl, of course, but that’s mostly because their shenanigans are anything but benign, and generally do far more lasting harm than temporary good. However, a person in emotional distress–while not crying out for a psychic band-aid–often needs any tool you can bring to bear on their problem, and mostly those that may be understood by the patient as mutually helpful and open to be part of the doctor-patient dialogue. To that end, you cannot ignore the patient’s religious or cultural heritage.

To be clear, “actual psychiatrists” (and psychologists, and MCSWs, and CPNs, et al.) have aligned themselves with this movement (and fie on the lot of them). That they are summarily laughed out of symposiums isn’t really taking the bull[shit] by the horns and dealing it an official death blow, once and for all. The APA and AMA need to make joint statements that reparative or conversion therapies are destructive, mentally and physically, to the people who undertake them, and that the license/accreditation of anyone practicing them should be seriously imperiled.

Until and beyond that time, though, if the deployment of some religious awareness (scripture, talmud, koans, friggin’ voodoo for all I care) helps the patient, then it should not be dismissed out of hand just because it’s not science-y enough. Plenty of studies show that faith can be ‘reparative’ without calling orientation into question at all. Barring any other difficult-to-measure effects, it’s often something with which the patient is familiar and those tools should rarely be discarded unless they’re being used like an addiction or a compulsion.

http://www.queersunited.blogspot.com