CNN Features Fake Therapist

I didn't see the "conversion therapy" segment on CNN last night, but the transcript is available online. I also don't have access to it from the computer I'm on right now, but I think you can watch the video HERE.

The segment features an interview with Richard Cohen, a prominent spokesman for the "ex-gay" movement, if you can call it that. Cohen was permanently expelled from the American Counseling Association for multiple ethical violations in 2002. He practices psychotherapy without a license. He has his own "theory," which is supported by exactly zero research. He claims to be able to make gay guys straight.

Here's some from the CNN transcript:

DEBORAH FEYERICK, CNN CORRESPONDENT: If you've been watching "The Sopranos" on HBO, then you know the secret.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sometimes you tell lies so long you don't know when to stop.

FEYERICK: Vito, a mob guy, married with kids, on the run, knowing he'll be killed because he's gay.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: There are these church groups. They could cure you of this.

FEYERICK: While it may sound like a plot line, the reaction from Vito's TV wife that there's a cure is very real. And it's a reaction many gay people and their families wonder about in the beginning. Is it possible to change, to not be gay.

There are groups who believe that it is possible. Some use religion. Others more unusual techniques. More on that in a moment. But whether it's faith based or secular, Dr. Jack Drescher of the American Psychiatric Association says the practice of so-called conversion therapy is dangerous.

DR. JACK DRESCHER, AMERICAN PSYCHIATRIC ASSOC.: People who have done anything approximating a scientific report admit that the majority of people who try to change their sexual orientation do not change.

FEYERICK: And yet this man, who tells us he was once gay, claims to have helped hundreds of men like him.

Richard Cohen, now married with three kids, is a leader in the so-called reparative therapy movement. With just more than 1,000 members it is not a particularly big movement, but because it's so controversial and despised within the gay community it tends to get a lot of attention.

(on camera): What you're suggesting is that being gay is a switch you can turn on or off.

RICHARD COHEN, CONVERSION THERAPIST: People have a right to determine how they wish to live their life. If they choose to live a gay life, great, OK. But to say I have to live as a gay man because I had those desires, that's discrimination.

FEYERICK (voice-over): Cohen, who had several boyfriends, spent years in various kinds of therapy searching for answers. It wasn't until he remembered being sexually abused by a man when he was a child that what he calls his convergence process began,

COHEN: I knew it wasn't for me. I knew it in my gut I wasn't born this way.

FEYERICK: Cohen is an unlicensed therapist. He offers the theory that some kind of childhood trauma triggers homosexuality. All it takes is figuring out what it is, healing from it and moving on. One of his clients is a 42 year old program analyst who we'll call Rob. Because it is such a sensitive subject, he asked us to shield his identity.

He began seeing Cohen three years ago after years of struggling with unwanted homosexual feelings.

"ROB", CONVERSION THERAPY CLIENT: I had a mother that basically committed emotional incest with me because they had a very bad marriage. She used me as her husband, a stand-in.

FEYERICK: Cohen explains Rob's same-sex attraction is typical of the men he treats. Cold, distant dad, overbearing mom and overly sensitive kid. He showed us some of his unconventional techniques like touch therapy, in which he encouraging Rob to seek out same-sex mentors to basically re-create a healthy father-son bond. PAULA ZAHN NOW

In case you haven't heard any of this stuff before, you should know that this is a line used by anti-gay psychotherapists, but there is no research anywhere, ever, that supports the idea that these kinds of family dynamics have anything to do with a person turning out gay.

Also, I saw some screenshots of this, and I think that at this time in the interview this other guy is lying on a couch hugging Richard Cohen. As John Aravosis at AmericaBlog says, "You have to see this part of the segment, it's creepy as hell."

COHEN: It's nonsexual. It establishes like parent-child relationship. So he didn't experience this growing up with his dad. FEYERICK (on camera): Rob, do you feel a sexual connection right now?

ROB: No, I don't. I feel very safe and very comforted and it just feels wonderful.

FEYERICK (voice-over): Another technique, bioenergetics, designed to help clients release memories stored in the muscles, in this case by hitting a pillow with a tennis racket.

COHEN: I was angry at my mother. So I started saying, mom! mom! mom! mom! Why did you do that to me?

FEYERICK: So is being gay a matter of nature or nurture? Doctors say they don't know for sure. There is no gay gene and no definitive scientific proof that one's family or environment triggers same-sex attraction.

That's why mainstream mental health experts have such a huge problem with Cohen and those like him who promote reparative therapy as legitimate.

It is my understanding that the "problem" these professional groups have with quacks like Cohen has to do with the damage they cause to their clients and the confusion they generate in the minds of the public with their fake theories and crazy fake-therapies.

But who am I to say?

DRESCHER: It's like this person has landed on Earth from Mars and is doing things that the rest of us don't believe in and that we don't do. And it's just unfortunate that there are people who are willing to accept because of their desperate homosexual feelings, to accept these kinds of treatments.

FEYERICK: 48-year-old Xavier Yager sent spent five years in reparative therapy.

XAVIER YAGER, FORMER THERAPY CLIENT: It drove me to the edge of suicide, several times.

FEYERICK: He says it was so damaging, it took years to recover.

YAGER: From my farthest back recollection, I was always gay. I just tried -- you know, they always say it's a choice to be gay. I chose to try to be straight. And I found it was unattainable.

FEYERICK: Yager is now happily gay. Rob is also happy, but for the opposite reason.

ROB: I know what I'm experiencing. I know the freedom that I feel now. And as a result of the work, I don't have same-sex attractions anymore.

(Let's come back and ask him again in five years, ok?)

FEYERICK: He's even been chatting with women on the Internet, hoping to line up dates.

(on camera): Do you see yourself now as an ex-gay?

ROB: I see myself now as a much happier person.

FEYERICK (voice-over): A person who seems to have found his own inner peace. Deborah Feyerick, CNN, Bowie, Maryland. (END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAHN: Richard Cohen says he counsels some women, but the majority of his clients are men.

Now, the pictures in our next story are absolutely incredible. Watch this closely. How did a family and their cat get out of this burning apartment alive? We'll show you.

I love that ending, the cat gets out of the burning apartment ... it's one thing and then another, foks.