George Miller says: Couldn't agree more with this article from 2011 is Psychology Today, but the problem is they keep doubling down with the same failed techniques and even worse, have been turning more and more to meds as the answer...as is seen in the easing of laws in states such as mine (NJ) where they are making it easier for psychologists to become nurse practitioners with the ability to prescribe psychopharms.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/addiction-in-society/201101/psychology-has-failed

By Andrew Chung
(Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday left intact California's ban on "gay conversion" therapy aimed at turning youths under age 18 away from homosexuality, rejecting a Christian minister's challenge to the law asserting it violates religious rights.
The justices, turning away a challenge to the 2012 law for the second time in three years, let stand a lower court's ruling that it was constitutional and neither impinged upon free exercise of religion nor impacted the activities of clergy members.
The law prohibits state-licensed mental health counselors, including psychologists and social workers, from offering therapy to change sexual orientation in minors. The Supreme Court in 2014 refused to review the law after an appeals court rejected claims that the ban infringed on free speech rights under U.S. Constitution's the First Amendment.
California outlawed gay conversion therapy in 2012, calling it ineffective and harmful. New Jersey, Illinois, Oregon, Vermont, New Mexico and the District of Columbia have similar laws on the books, according to the Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. The Supreme Court turned away a challenge to New Jersey's law in 2015.
Gay conversion therapy methods range from counseling, hypnosis and dating-skill training to aversive techniques that induce pain or electric shocks in response to same-sex erotic images, according to California officials. Such treatments stem from a belief that homosexuality is a mental illness, a view that has been discredited for decades, the state said in court papers.
Lead plaintiff Donald Welch, an ordained minister and licensed family therapist, oversees counseling at Skyline Wesleyan Church, an evangelical Christian church in the San Diego area that believes sexuality belongs only in a marriage between a man and a woman.
Welch, along with a Catholic psychiatrist and a man who underwent conversion therapy and now aspires to perform it on others, sued the state claiming the law is unconstitutional.
After their free speech challenge failed, the plaintiffs' pressed their claim that the ban violates their right to freely exercise their religion. Last October, the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected their arguments.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)

However, the real question (see end of article) is "How much confidence do you have in the mental health conceptualization?" Lipstick on a pig doesn't undo the nature of the pig, nor does baptizing it: as per the Christian integration efforts.

http://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/the-city-gates.cfm?id=1445

St. Luke’s Institute

By Phil Lawler (bio - articles - email) | Apr 25, 2017

There’s irony in the news that a laicized priest, who once ran a counseling center, has agreed to counseling as a condition of his parole.

In case you missed the story, Edward Arsenault resigned from his post as head of the St. Luke Institute in Maryland in 2013, after he was charged with financial as well as sexual improprieties. He was eventually sentenced to a 4-year prison term after pleading guilty to misappropriating over $300,000 from the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire, where he once served as chancellor. The sexual improprieties, involving an adult male recording artist, were not criminal offenses.

One more disgraced priest; one more instance of clerical corruption. But the fact that this particular priest was once the president of the St. Luke Institute—the most prominent of the centers that treated pedophile priests—begins to look like something more than ironic happenstance.

The St. Luke Center has an unhappy leadership history. Its founder, Father Michael Peterson, died of AIDS in 1987. In 1989, the institute brought aboard a Jesuit, Father Curtis Bryant, as head of therapy. Writing in Catholic World Report in February 1997, investigative journalist Lesley Payne quoted one therapist’s report on Bryant’s odd behavior:

    Sometimes a visiting bishop would meet Curtis, seeing him prance around like a peacock, and say, “Who the hell was that?” We’d say, “Oh, he’s our director.”

Bryant disappeared from the scene in 1996, shortly after his license to practice counseling become “inactive,” for reasons that were not made public.

Father Canice Connors, the new president of St. Luke’s, was criticized for failing to rein in Bryant. He was also criticized, among other things, for his own spiritual assessment of the notorious pedophile priest John Geoghan: the subject of the lawsuit that broke open the sex-abuse scandal in the Boston archdiocese. After Geoghan’s 3rd stint of counseling, Connors said “there are no particular recommendations concerning his spiritual life since he is involved in spiritual direction and seems to have a good prayer life.”

After leaving St. Luke’s, and becoming president of the Conference of Major Superiors of Men, Father Connors complained that the US bishops, with their Dallas Charter, had become involved in “scapegoating the abusers.” He might have borrowed that idea from Father Stephen Rossetti, who, at about the same time, was cautioning bishops: “We need to be careful that we don’t make anyone—whether it’s priests or gays—scapegoats.” Father Rossetti wrote in America magazine, regarding the fallout of the sex-abuse scandal: “What I’m afraid of is we’re going into this witch-hunt for gays.”

Oh, and did I mention? Father Rossetti—he’s now Monsignor Rossetti, and a regular participant in expert panels on this topic—became president of the St. Luke Institute when Father Connors left. For that matter, he became interim president again after Arsenault’s precipitous departure.

Now, reflecting on all of the above, a few questions:

    How much confidence do you have in the St. Luke Institute?
    How many priests who were sent to the St. Luke Institute for counseling, and then returned to
    ministry, later became (further) involved in sexual abuse?
    How much confidence have the American bishops shown in the Institute and its leaders?
       Has that  changed in the past 15 years, as the above information has come to light? If not, why not?

Phil Lawler has been a Catholic journalist for more than 30 years. He has edited several Catholic magazines and written eight books. Founder of Catholic World News, he is the news director and lead analyst at CatholicCulture.org.