Sunday, March 23, 2014

'You're gay because there are demons in you': Dr Christian Jessen

Dr Christian Jessen, the British TV doctor who presents Embarrassing Bodies, tonight goes undercover in an alarming documentary, testing various therapies which claim to 'rid' people of homosexuality.
 
In the Channel 4 documentary, Undercover Doctor: Cure Me I’m Gay, openly gay Dr Jessen explores the various controversial methods being deployed in the UK and US to ‘cure’ gay patients.
These include 'aversion therapy' in UK and 'gay rehab' in the US.
 
We see Dr Jessen given bottle of ipecac syrup to drink, to make him vomit for hours while looking at pictures of naked men and listening to tapes telling him he is ‘worthless,’ that being gay was evil and that he should want to have sex with women.

This ‘shock therapy’ used to be deployed by doctors for treating homosexuality, ‘since probably the 1920s, 30, 40s and going on well into the 1970s and 80s,’ Dr Jessen tells Mail Online.
 
Patients were given injections every two hours which would make them vomit and have diarrhoea.
The theory was that, afterwards, seeing images of naked men or having homosexual thoughts, would cause a physical reaction.
 
No patients claimed to be cured by this method.
 
‘I can’t believe that people like me – a doctor – would actually prescribe this to people like me – gay,’ Dr Jessen told This Morning.
 
The documentary then shows Dr Jessen visit the southern states of America, known as the Bible Belt.
 
Dr Jessen is handed ipecac syrup to drink, to make him vomit for hours whilst looking at pictures of naked men and listening to tapes telling him he is ¿worthless,¿ because he is gay
Dr Jessen drinks ipecac syrup to make him vomit during 'Aversion Therapy'
 
 
Visibly ill, Dr Jessen is examined after the experiment, as show in C4's Cure Me I'm Gay documentary
Dr Jessen is handed ipecac syrup to drink to make him vomit for hours whilst looking at pictures of naked men and listening to tapes telling him he is ‘worthless,’ because he is gay
 
Some in these deeply religious areas believe that being gay is a state of mind - one that can be treated.
‘The most shocking thing, was that these religious leaders do not believe we were born gay, but that  it’s a condition caused by childhood trauma,’ says Dr Jessen in the documentary.
 
Worried about how these views would affect young people, Dr Jessen contacted many Evangelistic churches within the Bible Belt, but they refused to grant him interviews. Instead, he spoke to young church-goers outside the building to ask their views.
 
We see him speak to various teenagers, who stated that being gay is a ‘state of mind.’ Two teenage girls, aged 16 and 20, explain that being gay ‘happens when bad spirits are inside you. Demons.’ Dr Jessen is visibly upset by this.
 
‘Imagine being gay and being told that?’ he says, before crying in frustration. ‘I think you should get me out of here, I’ve had enough,’ he says to the camera crew before walking away.
 
‘I’d been doing reasonably well before then, keeping myself together and regarding all of this as just nonsense,’ Dr Jessen tell Mail Online.
 
‘Rather stupidly, I thought younger people must share different views and I hoped to see some open-mindedness. ‘It saddened me deeply that this wasn’t the case.
 
‘They don’t come up with these ideas themselves, they are taught them, and that’s incredibly worrying. ‘They go to schools where creationism is taught over evolution, it’s unbelievable.’
During ‘right brain therapy,’ Dr Jessen went undercover, posing as ‘Adrian’, a gay man who wanted to be cured.
 
He visited Jerry Mungadze, an ex-church pastor, who claims to be a doctor. However, as Dr Jessen found out, Mungadze has no medical qualifications beyond a minor degree in psychology.
 
His ‘right brain therapy,’ which costs $250, claims to spot how gay the patient actually is, and why, by getting them to colour in a drawing of a brain.

Posing as ‘Adrian,’ Dr Jessen did this, with no prior medical consultation from Mungadze, who even admitted to being colour blind.
 
 
‘Adrian’ had to describe which part of the drawing he had filled in which colour. ‘He told me the parts I’d drawn in black symbolised all the abuse I’d had as a child,’ says Dr Jessen.

‘Which is odd because I had a happy childhood and a lovely relationship with my parents.’ Unbelievably, we see Mungadze tell ‘Adrian’ that the thyroid gland (the gland located in your neck) and the adrenal gland (located above the kidney) are both located in the brain.
 

‘What a load of absolute nonsense,’ says Dr Jessen. ‘It’s damaging because people watch his videos and actually think you can retrain the brain.’

Dr Jessen also investigated ‘gay rehab.’ Dr Jessen visits John Smid, who is now openly gay, but for years was married and living in denial.

Smid used to run a rehabilitation programme for gay men before he accepted his sexuality and retired in 2007. 'As with drug or alcohol rehabilitation, the rehab attempts to completely isolate the patient from his addiction,’ explains Dr Jessen.
In C4's documentary Undercover Doctor: Cure Me I'm Gay, Dr Jessen is tested at Cornell University in New York to confirm that he is, in fact, '100% gay.'
In C4's documentary Undercover Doctor: Cure Me I'm Gay, Dr Jessen is tested at Cornell University in New York to confirm that he is, in fact, '100% gay.'
 
Wires are connected to Dr Jessen during an experiment at Cornell University in New York to test his levels of homosexuality
Wires are connected to Dr Jessen during an experiment at Cornell University in New York to test his levels of homosexuality
 
Smid himself now admits: 'I’ve never met a man who experienced a change from homosexual to heterosexual.' Dr Jessen says that he hopes the documentary raises awareness and helps the gay community feel more assured.
 

‘I hope young, vulnerable people who perhaps may have considered these therapies will watch the programme and realise it’s all nonsense and they have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of,’ he says.

Daily Mail
 

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