NOM BLOG

New UK Ban: Therapists Have No Right to Aid Clients Who Want Help With Living Chastely

 

A would be therapist is kicked out of a program and called a threat to "public safety" because he says he used to live as a gay man and no longer does. Therapists warned their licenses will be threatened if they try to help patients who want help with same-sex attraction.

Whether you are gay or not, the withdrawal of all assistance in helping people live the lives they choose--and the punitive attitude towards scientific discussion and professional practice--is chilling. An incredible repression not only of speech, and employment, but of science itself:

While most medical ethics throughout the western world has adopted the primacy of patient autonomy as its guiding principle, the psychiatric and psychological professions in the UK are becoming increasingly authoritarian in matters of sexuality, according to one would-be therapist.

Recently published professional guidelines in the UK say it is an “ethical offense” to either offer to help a client overcome homosexual temptations and feelings, or to accede to a request to do so from a client.

“I would agree that the focus is no longer on autonomy” in ethics in psychotherapy, said Dr. Michael Davidson, PhD, Director of the Core Issues Trust. In Britain’s main psychotherapeutic organisations, “the person-centred approach is not being respected,” he said.

The Core Issues Trust is a Christian organisation that helps equip Christian ministers to help those with unwanted same-sex attraction and who want to leave the gay lifestyle.

Dr. Davidson told LifeSiteNews.com this week that he has fallen afoul of a “politically motivated” shift within the counselling and psychotherapeutic professional organisations, one that he says is betraying the real needs of clients and patients, and their freedom to make choices.

“I started my training in 2009 with the UK Psychodrama Association, and was very open and explicit about my position, including about my own journey out of homosexuality,” he said.

Nonetheless, two years into his training to become a therapist, Davidson was suddenly presented with an “interim order” telling him he was a threat to “public safety” and was not allowed to practice any type of therapy or even to train and attend classes, pending the outcome of an investigation into his conduct.

Since the publication last summer of the professional guidance, he said, the psychotherapeutic community has created a climate in which therapists who do not toe the official “gay affirming” line, daring to assert that homosexuality is not, or does not have to be a fixed condition, face severe censure, even the loss of their professional credentials.

Dr. Davidson said that the system overrules even the wishes of patients, telling them, in effect, that they must remain in the homosexual lifestyle, whether they want to or not. -- LifeSiteNews

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