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Well, she broke up with me more than I broke up with her,” the South Africa native told Rolling Stone in November 2017, noting that he was in “severe emotional pain” since the breakup. As she wasn’t attracted to these images, he used hypnosis to “reinforce and generalise this feeling and coax what my repressed heterosexuality into returning”.On-Again, Off-Again Celebrity Couples Read article Similarly, Sarah recalled her psychotherapist showing her ‘top-shelf porn’ magazine images of women to see if she was ‘really’ gay or not. Not surprisingly, lesbian women weren’t necessarily attracted to these kinds of objectified images of women in the first place. The psychologists were making all kinds of assumptions, not only about homosexuality being a ‘behavioural disorder’, but also about the nature of female sexuality. Replacing the image with a more ‘appropriate’ one meant they avoided getting the electric shock, giving them the illusion that they were in control.
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The ‘anticipatory avoidance’ type of aversion therapy, which was pioneered at North Manchester General, offered patients the option to press a button to remove the image and replace it with a sexualised image of the ‘opposite’ sex. For example, while gay men were encouraged to be attracted to ‘soft porn’ images of naked women and given electric shocks when viewing pictures of naked men, women were given shocks if they lingered over sexualised images of women. We discovered some mental health professionals not only sought to ‘cure’ lesbians but also imposed naive assumptions that women were attracted to women in the same way as they assumed straight men were. After the treatment, she had subsequently discovered feminism, came out, and was happily living with her long-term female partner. Now in her 70s, she was surprised to learn that her story had been written up without her permission by the psychologists as a ‘successful’ case of treatment. Finding the needle in the haystackīy chance, I was chatting with an friend and colleague about the research and discovered that she knew a woman who’d experienced aversion therapy. When she put us in touch, it turned out that this was one of the women who had received the ‘therapy’ at North Manchester. We were intrigued by these cases, but were unable to access NMGH records, so had no way of finding out what happened to the women involved, or how many other women went through this procedure. Some women had definitely been subjected to this treatment, as two examples of young women were anonymously recorded in a research paper as ‘successfully’ treated. The hospital had been given an anonymous donation on the condition that the money was used to treat homosexuality.
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We knew from the psychiatric literature that a form of aversion therapy was administered by psychologists at the North Manchester General Hospital (NMGH) in the mid-1960s. While there has been a growth in ‘hidden from history’-type research (often called archival activism), there is still little knowledge about what happened to LGBTQI people, especially women, who ended up in the psychiatric system. However, there is much less known about how they overlap. There is substantial and growing interest in LGBT history and, to a much lesser extent, psychiatric survivor history. But, we asked, what happened to women? Although female homosexuality wasn’t criminalised, unlike male homosexuality, it was still classified as a mental disorder (‘sexual deviation’) that could be medically treated. For gay men, aversion therapy involved being given emetic drugs and receiving electric shocks while they viewed naked images of men. Sarah Carr and I first met several years ago at a mental health conference when she presented a powerful account of her experiences of being a gay woman and a psychiatric survivor.Īfterwards, we spoke about a colleague’s research into gay men’s experiences of receiving aversion therapy to ‘treat’ their sexuality.