Members of the new parliament must take a stand and ensure conversion therapies are banned

John Sam Jones

Below is an open letter to the members of the new parliament in Westminster concerning Conversion Therapy.

It will be half a century in January since I underwent ‘conversion therapy’ as an eighteen year old – and whilst the form of therapy I experienced had long been abandoned, forms of conversion therapy are still being practised which the previous government said it would ban and then reneged on the promise.

Dear Members of the new UK Parliament

I write just days after the July election, filled with hope for the country I feel let me down so badly, and with some confidence in the new Prime Minister’s pledge that service to the people of the four nations comes before party fervour.

Next January (2025) it will be fifty years since I, as a frightened and ashamed eighteen-year-old, sought to have myself cured of homosexuality. The disgust at being homosexual, absorbed from centuries of opprobrium handed down in whispered tones and sometimes shouted in verbal abuse and preached against from fire-and-brimstone pulpits had brought me to a chasm of self-hatred.

Depressed and thinking about suicide, I sought the advice of our family doctor – a family friend. Alarmed, concerned and deeply caring, he arranged for me to see a psychiatrist the next day!

Dinosaur asylums

The North Wales Hospital in Denbigh was one of those dinosaur asylums from the Victorian Age. The psychiatrist, Dr Dafydd Alun Jones, spoke reassuringly with me both in English and in Welsh and offered a treatment that would cure me – if I committed myself fully to the goal of becoming normal… and a part of that commitment was to become an inpatient. I agreed.

Electric Shock Aversion Therapy – for an hour a day – for many weeks. A wrist band with electrodes shocking me when my body responded to visual homosexual images. As an eighteen-year-old from the mid-Wales coast, any access to same-sex pornography had been non-existent, but in the treatment room of the old asylum I was exposed to explicit gay porn and shocked repeatedly if my penis so much as twitched.

The cocktail of tranquilising and antidepressant drugs clouded the judgement of an already confused and anguished mind, but I did come to realize that this aversion therapy was abusive… though I felt trapped within a mental health system that believed homosexuality was a form of mental illness that could – and should – be cured.

So, the pornography and eclectic shocks continued – until one afternoon a simple thought emerged from the chaos in my head: Convince them that the treatment has been successful.

Traumatized

Just days after my discharge from The North Wales Hospital – still a homosexual, but now additionally burdened by the knowledge that the electric shock aversion therapy had been abusive and had traumatized me in ways I could not yet imagine or articulate, I took a massive overdose.

I’m pleased to say that Electric Shock Aversion Therapy is no longer practised in the NHS in the UK – though many, like me, who endured it and survived, still await an apology. Conversion Therapy, however, has still not been outlawed despite previous government promises.

Young people, insecure in their sexual identity and feeling the pressures from faith and cultural traditions that still hold negative views on homosexuality, experience ‘talking therapies’ that are no less abusive than the electric shocks I endured. My simple plea, then, is to have legislation drafted to have these abhorrent conversion therapies made illegal.

Yes. I survived my suicide attempt… and in some strange way… and over many months, I was radicalised by my experience in that old Victorian Asylum, and I came to understand that I had a responsibility – even an obligation to become the best gay man I could be.

For almost a decade after those first months of 1975, the traumatization of my psyche caused by Dr D A Jones’s Electric Shock Aversion Therapy emerged and became a daily reality. All sexual thoughts, desires and situations brought vivid flashbacks of electric shocks – I was a young man who had effectively been rendered unable to have any kind of sexual relationship… and this caused me deep distress.

But life can take some interesting and unexpected turns and an opportunity arose to pursue a post-graduate education in Berkeley, California through a scholarship from the World Council of Churches.

Gay-positive therapy

This also proffered the opportunity to seek ‘gay-positive therapy’ in San Francisco. Despite the considerable financial burden of this therapy for an overseas graduate student who had to work more than twenty hours a week on top of a full academic timetable to make ends meet, I was encouraged and enabled to unlearn the negative narrative of homosexuality so prevalent in my cultural and religious background, and I was able to become reconciled to the abusive treatment I’d received… and so the healing began.

I’m sorry if you’ve found this letter overly long. My purpose was not just to highlight the absurd notion that someone’s sexual orientation needs to be changed or can be changed by abusive therapies, but also to help you appreciate the lasting trauma such abuse can cause.

I do hope you’ve been distressed by what you’ve read… distressed enough to take a stand and ensure conversion therapies are banned.

Thank you.

Yours sincerely,

John Sam Jones