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Psychotherapy That Is Pseudoscience According to Professionals: Conversion Therapy
Not all “therapies” that are offered are bona fide psychotherapies, according to experts and the American Psychiatric Association.
Psychotherapy has proven to be beneficial to many who seek help with everyday issues or a mental health diagnosis, but not all “therapies” are legitimate and based on solid research. When we begin to examine some of them, they don’t hold up because they are based on myths, unproven theories, or outright nonsense. One of the prime examples of pseudoscientific “therapies” for LGBTQ individuals is conversion therapy.
Allegedly intended to “cure” homosexuality, the methods and the history of this “therapy” are shocking and criminal in their entirety. The soothsayers backing these “cures” went to extreme measures in a frantic effort to bring these gay individuals back into the fold as it were. For example, “Eugen Steinach, a pioneering Austrian endocrinologist, homosexuality was rooted in a man’s testicles. This theory led to testicle transplantation experiments in the 1920s during which gay men were castrated, then given “heterosexual” testicles.”
Freud took a less drastic approach and believed homosexuality was related to a problem in arrested sexual development and that it was a matter of conditioning that needed to be…