Psychedelic Conversion Therapy, Part 1: The First Wave
Neşe and Russell review the history and harms of conversion therapy practices in the broader medical landscape, as well as their persistence throughout the history of psychedelic research.
In the first wave of psychedelic science, influential figures helped legitimize deeply harmful ideas about pharmaceutical assistance in shifting identity. Timothy Leary publicly suggested psychedelics could “cure” homosexuality. Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) engaged in psychedelic-assisted conversion efforts with individuals who wrote to him seeking change. Stanislav Grof framed homosexuality as a pathology and explored psychedelic treatments aimed at altering sexual orientation.
This history is often ignored or sanitized in contemporary discussions about psychedelics. But it is more relevant than ever as psychedelics gain support from many of the same political and cultural forces working to roll back protections against conversion therapy and of LGBTQ+ rights.
Chapters:
0:00:00 Intro
0:04:54 Harms of conversion therapy and rollback of conversion therapy ban
0:15:55 Conversion therapy in historic psychedelic research
0:17:50 Andrea Ens research, Timothy Leary claims LSD can cure homosexuality
0:24:30 Archival letters and Ram Dass performing conversion therapy
0:28:45 Stan Grof conversion therapy writings and controversy
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Footnotes:
"High dose shock therapy with LSD and mescaline: the experiments of a French doctor on two homosexual adolescents in the 1960s" by Zoë Dubus (Synergetic Press):
https://hal.science/hal-03913920v1/document
“A Specific Cure for Homosexuality: Postwar Psychedelic Conversion Therapies in the United States and Canada” by Andrea Ens (University of Wisconsin-Madison):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsI0LjMuL8g
"'Wish I would be normal': LSD and Homosexuality at Hollywood Hospital, 1955-1973" by Andrea Ens (University of Saskatchewan Master's Thesis):
https://harvest.usask.ca/items/0b737538-8322-4ba9-b62e-61e70869794e
"The shameful history of psychedelic gay conversion therapy" (Plastic Brain):
https://plasticbrainblog.com/2019/05/29/history-psychedelic-gay-conversion-therapy/
"Consensus Statement Condemning Psychedelic Conversion Therapy and Suggestions for Addressing Ongoing Harms Against LGBTQIA+ People in Psychedelic Research and Therapy":
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfsgdmGs0OxfvZyTP0cETBE-I4P3afwVblJ7cegrCetdmCrEg/viewform
"An Open Letter Reply to Dr. Stan Grof" (Open Foundation):
https://open-foundation.org/an-open-letter-reply-to-dr-stan-grof/
"Acknowledging the Past, Affirming Our Commitment to Healing For All" / Stan Grof letter (MAPS):
Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically from YouTube's captions, then cleaned up by removing filler words, repeated words and background sounds. It may still contain errors.
[00:00] Yes, I've heard cases of explicit harm that has come from conversion therapy, immense shame, guilt, increased suicidality, again, distance in the relationship with one's parents, with God, and hesitancy to go back to therapy. I think those are pretty significant harms. I think that a lot of people that are using psychedelics find a lot of value spiritually in their psychedelic usage. And the spiritual self-discovery through psychedelics is a huge throughine of the culture in my opinion. And if we are creating hostile spaces to certain identities for people that find their spirituality through psychedelics, I think that's on similar par to what the Christian community has done as far as harming and turning away people with these identities.
[00:45] Other psychedelic practitioners in this period stress their supposed potential to strengthen or even create heterosexual desire. This is exemplified by Timothy Lir's claim that LSD is a specific cure for homosexuality. In 2025, the past writings of Stan Grath were called into question for their framing of homosexuality and the treatment of homosexual behaviors. I feel that Stan is my professional and spiritual father. Many of Gra's works over the years, he described homosexuality as a sexual deviation that resulted from trauma and that that deviation could be changed or potentially even cured using psychedelic treatments. Welcome to the Psymposia podcast.
[01:37] I'm Russell here with Nishay. Today we are starting a series that is kind of an unfortunate one. We're not super excited to be here discussing this, but this series is going to explore conversion therapy and its implications in the psychedelic therapy space. Nay, do you want to kind of tell the audience why we're here talking about this today at this moment in history? Yeah. Well, this extends some of our other efforts to alert the left to what has been going on in this field of psychedelic medicine. Ultimately, there have been signals for a few years now that there were certain far-right contingents of people working in the psychedelic medicine space who were interested in developing psychedelic medicine for so-called conversion therapy for sexual orientation and gender identity.
[02:24] We have been tracking that for a number of years now, but things have unfortunately come to more of a head recently with a combination of Trump's recently signed executive order in favor of psychedelic medicine and also a recent Supreme Court ruling that rolled back a ban on conversion therapy for adolescence in Colorado. Absolutely. The general research around the suppression of identity and the harms that can come from this is called sexual orientation and gender identity and expression change efforts. S O ge. If people want to do more research into the harms and the impact that this kind of therapy has on minors, you can look it up that way. You'll find a lot of literature on the subject. up top.
[03:10] I think it will help to understand the structure that we're going into these episodes with. The first part of this series will explore a 101 on conversion therapy, what it is, and the harms that can come from this approach, as well as the storied history of conversion therapy approaches being used in psychedelic therapy contexts. The second part of this series is going to look at influential figures on the right wing advancing this narrative of trans experience and queer experience as a disease in search of a cure. These figures are going to include Jordan Peterson who has been kind of at the forefront of connecting conversion therapy and psychedelic therapy and figures like Elon Musk who pathize the woke mind virus around progressive issues like trans rights and human rights.
[03:58] And part three will be an interview with Caleb Graves, an anti-fascist preacher and host of the Psychedelic Theology podcast, who recently identified that conversion therapy efforts in the psychedelic field are just a handshake away from Donald Trump in recent reporting that he did for good faith media. Many progressives who support psychedelic medicine think that this is just about healing. But there are real risks to this industry getting built out under the opices of a fascist government. And at the end of the day, this isn't even just about the LGBT community. This has broader risk for any type of non-normative or non-conforming identities. The worst case scenario here isn't guaranteed, but this is currently the direction that things are heading.
[04:44] We hope by the end of this series, you'll be better informed to educate your communities and also act to prevent the worst case scenario from happening. So, let's jump into some of the 101 on what conversion therapy is. We wanted to highlight one recent interview with a faith-based Christian therapist out of Colorado who spoke to some of these issues. There's plenty of secular places that you could look for this information, but because this issue is so stressed in faith-based communities. We thought it was particularly insightful to hear the critiques of conversion therapy from someone within the faith-based community. And we think that this interview does a good job of highlighting some of these points. The person being interviewed is Julia Saduski, who is a Christian therapist in Colorado. She wrote a statement supporting Colorado's ban on conversion therapy for minors during the leadup to the Supreme Court's decision rolling back restrictions on these practices.
[05:36] The first clip I have from Julia's interview is her description of why she felt the need to publicly speak out about this case. And what she describes is something that came up in our discussions of this sort of behind the scenes about this case being what you refer to as a category error framed around free speech issues. Can you sort of speak to that and how you see this case before we jump into this clip? Category errors in a general sense happen when things are referred to in ways that they imply that they belong to a category of things that they don't actually apply to. And so in this case, talk therapy is described in a way as like, well, that's talking, it's speech, and so we should think of it in terms of free speech. When actually therapy, therapeutic speech and everyday speech are different types of speech that should have different guard rails, different rules applying to them.
[06:30] Absolutely. And I think the clip that I'll play here speaks to that sentiment exactly. And the plaintiff in this case, Kaylee Chios, argues the law viol violates her right to free speech. And I've never felt like my speech has been restricted. I also don't think of therapy as a place where it's merely talking. And I think that's a pretty fundamental difference between my approach and child's. I think of therapy as medical care, providing a service that people are paying for. And if it was merely about talking to one another, that would be more of a mentorship or a coaching role. So there's not really a space for free speech in that realm then. You know, I could imagine situations that would be infringements on free speech if a law was to be put forth that said, you know, as a licensed clinician, you have to teach your clients certain, let's say, perspectives on something like, gender medical transition. you have to come from this vantage point on
[07:31] The kind of morality, let's say, of a gender transition. Or if there were rulings on what you have to believe about marriage or sexual ethics, that might be a infringement on a therapist's freedom of speech. But to say that certain interventions are not effective and have been demonstrated to be harmful is not about my speech. It's about what I can and can't do as a licensed provider based on the evidence that we have today in the field. I thought that clip was a really good example of exactly what you're talking about regarding the category error there. This isn't a free speech issue. It's an issue of evidence-based practice being provided under a professional license. Yeah. Because what's the point ultimately of having a license to practice therapy if you're allowed to say whatever you want?
[08:21] You're supposed to be bound by the standards of what has been demonstrated through research to be effective. And when there's an intervention, like she was saying that there is actually extensive evidence that it causes harm, that should factor into the conditions under which therapists are allowed to practice. To my perspective, that's not controversial to say that. Exactly. And the next clip I have from her actually dives into what those harms look like. So I'll pull that up real quick for us. Do you believe conversion therapy works? I have sat with enough families, enough individuals who have sought it, to know that conversion therapy as a whole does not create categor categorical shifts in samesex attraction.
[09:07] People who come to me after conversion therapy on the whole continue to experience attraction to the same sex over the course of their life. And if there's an eb and flow in their experience of attraction and their orientation, we in the field would talk about that as natural fluidity. I don't see any evidence from the research we have on conversion therapy and on newer approaches that are oriented in that direction that demonstrates that it's effective. And I think anything that is beneficial that people report through conversion therapy can be received through adequate psychological care leaving behind conversion therapy. Besides it being ineffective, do you find it harmful? I have witnessed harms from conversion therapy as well. You know, some people tell me that it wasn't so much that it was harmful as in, you know, electric shock therapy or some of those older interventions that were tied to conversion therapy, but it was so focused on something that was not going to change that the harm often that I've
[10:10] Seen is what you didn't get in the therapy. So yes, I've heard cases of explicit harm that has come from conversion therapy, immense shame, guilt, increased suicidality, again, distance in the relationship with one's parents, with God, and hesitancy to go back to therapy. I think those are pretty significant harms. And then I've also seen just the harm that happens when you're not getting the care you need and you're distracted by something else. That last point comes up a lot in the literature on pseudocience in general. It's not just about the explicit harms of the intervention. It's also the opportunity cost of putting all of this time and resources into something that is not effective when there are actual evidence-based alternatives to address the issues that you're that are fundamentally like driving your need for treatment.
[11:07] Yeah. The last clip I have here on kind of the harms is just a little bit more of some nuance on what she was just talking about. I'll play that real quick as well. I think a lot of people are already suspicious of therapy and suspicious of going to therapy because we as a field have sometimes done real harm in our work with LGBT people. And I think that will be cemented in some ways for people. I think the idea that if you go to a therapist, you can't count on that therapist not doing harm in this area and the law doesn't state that in a broad sense really does lead to feelings of hopelessness, demoralization and just a ton of defensiveness from LGBT people feel where it feels like I can't just go to therapy and receive quality care.
[11:58] I now have to be constantly vetting this person and making sure they're doing their job. And that level of hypervigilance is not what we want for people and certainly not LGBT people in our communities. The Trevor Project did a survey recently that said 15% of LGBTQ people don't seek mental health treatment in fear of conversion therapy. Do you think a number like that would grow? I absolutely could see that number growing. I hear from teens already that they're hesitant to go to therapy around these experiences, even with laws like this in place. I think for many of them, they're much more comfortable looking online, talking with their peers and people they already know about these experiences. I think also these young people will hes be hesitant to talk with their parents, especially if their parents are people of faith because they may incorrectly in some cases assume that their parents are hoping for conversion or change.
[12:56] And so that just kind of wraps up some of the harms that she was discussing in that interview that I think are really important to discuss and think about and are a little bit more nuanced than a lot of people might consider when they initially think of conversion therapy as well. And just in case anyone wasn't familiar with the history of conversion therapy, there has been a assorted history of more overtly torture-like methods associated with conversion therapy like shocks or cocktails of drugs, kind of more MK ultra seeming therapy that's really bombarding people and trying to change them. But even the more apparently gentle versions of modern-day conversion therapy that don't have those extreme elements are still causing harm and they're still not effective.
[13:43] This final clip from Julia Seduski that we have up top here is one that she's describing as a Christian in faith-based communities that are Christian specific. But I think once we watch it, we'll have something to discuss related to how this relates to kind of the psychedelic world as well. I hear and what I see in the research is me, people with LGBT experiences want to have a spiritual life. They want to attend a faith community. And for many, they feel that these experiences preclude them not only from a faith community, but from a relationship with God. And so it becomes really important to look hard as people of faith at the ways that we've not helped and done harm to LGBT people and have really driven people away from our communities who we suffer by not having there.
[14:32] To me, how that relates to the psychedelic field is that I think that a lot of people that are using psychedelics find a lot of value spiritually in their psychedelic usage. And spiritual self-discovery through psychedelics is a huge throughine of the culture in my opinion. And if we are creating hostile spaces to certain identities for people that find their spirituality through psychedelics, I think that's on similar par to what the Christian community has done as far as harming and turning away people with these identities. There has been some research also looking at the stood community around adjacent issues. It was one of the large synretist Iwasa but with Christian elements churches that has been granted authority to provide a psychedelic brew iia to constituents as part of their services.
[15:25] But the ceremonies are have a large gendered component to it. And so some people find they're drawn to it for that connection to psychedelic spirituality, but then they find themselves not fitting with those gender norms and expectations within that psychedelic church. It's not quite conversion therapy, but it's still the ways that the norms and expectations are kind of impinging on people's individualities according to them in these contexts. Yeah, I think that's a great example of where this crops up in psychedelic communities and it transitions really well into the next segment of this episode that we wanted to get into, which is the history of conversion therapy in psychedelic research itself. So, you have it cropping up in the psychedelic spiritual context, but you also have quite a history of conversion therapy within the psychedelic research space.
[16:13] The initial psychedelic research wave that happened before prohibition occurred during a time when homosexuality was medically pathized and seen as a problem to treat. The initial DSM or the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, which is a list of diagnoses that you can be treated for, included homosexuality as a mental disorder. And that remained until it was removed in a later edition in 1973. So that window between the ' 50s and the '7s was the heyday of that initial wave of research in the 20th century. Yeah, I think a lot of people would be familiar with figures from back then like Timothy Liry, Richard Alpert, later Rom Das, some other people involved in that space would be like Andrew Wy and Houston Smith, people like that.
[17:05] There have been some modern-day researchers who have done a lot of retrospective work looking back at how this era of psychedelic research connected psychedelics with conversion therapy efforts that we wanted to kind of give a shout out here and look at a little bit of their research. One of the researchers we wanted to shout out in this field is Zoe Deuse, a post-doal researcher at the Paris City University who's written a chapter on this titled highdose shock therapy with LSD and masculine, the experiments of a French doctor on two homosexual adolescence in the 1960s looking at some case studies where this kind of treatment was done. She's also given talks on this subject which I'll toss a link to on screen here and in our show notes. The other researcher we wanted to shout out here is Andrea Ens of the University of Saskatchewan's Department of History.
[17:56] She wrote a dissertation on the LSD and homosexuality at the Hollywood Hospital in 1955 to 1973. The blog plastic brain interviewed Andrea Ends about this dissertation where they discussed that the hospital written about in the research was an internationally renowned hospital for LSD assisted psychoanalysis. Among its clients were actors Carrie Grant, jazz singer Andy Williams, and Ethel Kennedy, wife of Robert. In 2016, as part of a project to create a database of its records from 1955 to 1973, Ends was trollling through correspondence when a single sentence leapt out at her. A patient she calls Charles Strad, not his real name, wrote that after taking LSD at the hospital, he discovered his role in procreation, experiencing sexual interest in women for the first time.
[18:46] That really caught my attention, Ens told me. I did some more digging over that summer and found a total of 12 patients who all came to the Hollywood Hospital for treatment on the basis of their samesex attraction to men. The autobiographies written by clients as part of their treatment make for sobering reading. One described both himself and homosexuality as quote unquote evil. Another described his low self-esteem, writing that he was quote not worth reproducing. One man suffered from depression believing himself to be a devious person for concealing his true sexual desires and had considered suicide. Ends writes in her thesis that even though men came from a wide variety of backgrounds, they included a professor of political science, a clothes designer, a teacher, a social worker, and a Roman Catholic priest.
[19:33] They were united in their desperation to conform to prevailing heterosexual ideas. These men wanted treatment because they wanted to be loved. They wanted to be happy. They wanted to be accepted by their friends, families, loved ones, co-workers, and society at large. And they believed they could not have these things for themselves if they were homosexual. ENZ's longer dissertation goes much more in depth into the various techniques that were used for conversion therapy in that time frame and how psychedelic medicine slot into those treatment options. Yeah. So, we'll take a look at that right now. This is from Enza's dissertation. Let me zoom in on it here. Ends writes, "Mident 20th century psychiatric practitioners tried a variety of techniques in their attempts to transform homosexual men into heterosexuals, chemical agents, pharmacological or otherwise, often featured in these experiments.
[20:25] Some researchers and therapists tried electrical or chemical shock treatments to stop patients from associating homoerotic imagery with sexual attraction. Surgical interventions were another more extreme approach used by some practitioners. For instance, some therapists advocated labbotoies, chemical or physical castration, and the transplantation of sexual organs to curtail a patients same-sex desires. There were, of course, less physically invasive attempts at conversion therapy during this time, such as prayer, homosexual flooding, I.e. overdosing on homosexual stimuli, excessive bicycle riding, visiting prostitutes for the purposes of heterosexual sex, and long-term psychotherapy. However, these approaches were no less traumatic for patients because they caused psychological distress in their own right, and reinforced that homosexuality was an illness, meaning that these patients were diseased.
[21:17] She goes on from here to emphasize that all of those standard techniques were very timeintensive. And so part of the appeal of psychedelic therapy for homosexuality was there was initial reports from some of these treatment centers suggesting that there was a oneanddone very rapid result from treatments like LSD. And that that really mirrors a lot of the discourse that we're seeing today around the hype of psychedelics, right? Where it's like there are other treatment options for things, but there's a lot of enthusiasm about the rapid acting transformative potential of psychedelic medicines. Yeah. there's a consistent refrain in the hype train around these drugs that it's 10,000 hours of therapy in a single session or log lines like that accompanying these therapies.
[22:04] Another commonality between the historic research and the present day research is this conflict between ideas of what psychedelics can be in people's lives and for their identities. On the one hand, there are researchers and users of psychedelics who believe that these drugs can dissolve boundaries and encourage further acceptance of one's identity or an expansion of one's identity. And on the other hand, there are people who want to see these drugs used to realign one's identity with the normative values of the culture. And that dichotomy could be seen even in the historic research which is emphasized by Andrea Ends in a talk that she did with the University of Madison Wisconsin.
[22:50] Some like American college psychiatrist Preston K. Munter feared psychedelics might trigger unwanted same gender desires in young heterosexual consumers. These drugs, he warned, allowed college students and other youth to rationalize homosexual encounters on the grounds of a wider experience of life, a more vivid aesthetic experience or a consciousness expanding encounter. Other psychedelic practitioners in this period stressed their supposed potential to strengthen or even create heterosexual desire. This is exemplified by Timothy Lir's claim that LSD is a specific cure for homosexuality in a 1966 interview with Playboy magazine. Liry went on in this interview to cite examples of men and women who had supposedly discovered their attraction to other genders through LSD, such as American poet Alan Ginsburg and an unnamed lesbian woman who took LSD, saw a man in a bathing suit, and discovered sexual interest in men.
[23:44] These statements, though Liry never used this language at the time, allude to psychedelics's historical applications in conversion therapy. So even there, what's kind of funny in the references that she brings into the conversation there is that the person not exactly advocating for but claiming that psychedelics might make you more inclined to homosexual behavior or a more expansive idea about your sexuality was saying that in a fear-mongering sense like that person seemed to be afraid that psychedelics might be able to do that. Meanwhile, one of the biggest faces in historic psychedelic research at the time, Timothy Liry, was going in Playboy interviews and talking about psychedelics application for making you more heterosexual.
[24:32] As we were discussing making this series about psychedelic conversion therapy, it made me think back to a letter that I found addressed to Liry in the Timothy Liry Archives at the New York Public Library. I was a fellow at the library back in 2015 working with his collection and my eyes fell on this. This letter was from someone who had read Lirious Playboy article and was very desperate to try anything to address his homosexuality. It stood out to me over the past decade plus since I read it because of the desperation in this letter. It just it came across as very sad to me when I found it. Yeah, I think it's worth reading just to see what people were reaching out to. Timothy Liry, this figure that everybody knows, Richard Albert, Ralph Metsner, all these kind of names that we know from psychedelic history.
[25:23] This is a letter that came to them that said, "Dear sers, for some years, I have been troubled with the knowledge that I have homosexual tendencies. This condition is completely unwanted. I have tried just about everything I know to halt this condition, all without success." Having read the three articles on LSD in the Playboy magazine, my hopes soar once again. Is it true that this LSD could give me an interlook at myself and therefore allow me the opportunity to correct the obvious maladjustment I suffer? Have you ever treated a case like mine? And were the results successful? If not, you have a very willing case on which you may study. If such cases exist and the treatment is simple, how does one go about getting this treatment? I put myself at your mercy for an answer to my problem and remain waiting.
[26:09] Thanks to the research of Andrea Ends, we know that Richard Albert at least actually did act upon requests for conversion therapy like the one we just looked over in this letter. Albert, who later gained countercultural fame under the name Rom Doss, conducted LSD conversion therapy with an unnamed bisexual man in 1969 after the patient wrote Albert a letter begging him for help eliminating his same gender sexual desires. Albert asked his patient to bring a woman who he was close with and who was also attracted to him to his psychedelic session. Albert then instructed her to hold the patient if he desired and she was also asked to return for his fourth and final conversion therapy experience. These requests were meant to encourage the patients sexual desire towards this woman and women in general through extended physical contact under the influence of psychedelic materials.
[26:57] So yeah, the reason that this, you know, is so sad to me is because it's really clear that this individual was experiencing a lot of real distress about their homosexual interests. But there's been a lot of research on the fact that that sort of distress is a consequence of the societal biases that people are forced to live under. Much of the time that sort of distress that's being described there is a consequence of the societal impositions of bias and judgment against having a non-normative way of being in the world. And so just to see someone who is experiencing that firsthand, I mean, we don't know that much about their background, but based on what we know from the literature, that is likely a factor here. and then the way that they're hearing this story about how psychedelics can cure homosexuality and are clearly trying everything to address that.
[27:52] There's a lot of real vulnerability that's at stake in this sort of a topic. Part of the reason that that stood out to me is you see that a lot in the current day of psychedelic medicine where people are really desperate and struggling with things and they're hearing this kind of miracle cure narrative and then really pushing themselves to seek it out. Yeah, I was just about to say kind of the exact same sentiment, which is that those parallels with the modern media scene there. It's really interesting to see behind the scenes these letters being sent to researchers, which I'm sure are happening in the modern day right now for the things that psychedelics are being pushed as a miracle cure for. There's emails showing up in people's inboxes all the time, I'm sure, looking for how can I get involved with this study? How can I cure this thing that I deem incurable?
[28:39] So much of the public is familiar with a figure like Timothy Liry. He's in the zeitgeist and kind of popular culture. But there's another figure who was very influential in the history of psychedelic medical treatments for homosexuality. And that's Stan Grath. Yeah. And alongside his history of psychedelics and homosexuality, he's also got quite a significant place in the history of the modern psychedelic therapy movement, as we can illustrate through some clips of Rick Doblin, who is the founder of the multiddisciplinary association for psychedelic studies, the organization which in the 80s began taking MDMA through clinical trials and has largely been the industry leader in the modern psychedelic therapy industry. And some of you may have heard about the FDA's rejection of MDMMA assisted therapy that occurred in 2024.
[29:32] We at Saposia had presented at the FDA's advisory committee meeting with concerns about the way that MAPS had developed these clinical trials. Our concerns with the graphs therapy was a major part of our contributions just as some context of from where we're coming from. But Doin openly acknowledges that essentially the purpose of those clinical trials was to bring Grath's therapy to the wider world. Before we get into the context around Grath's views on homosexuality, maybe we can play a couple of clips that illustrate the point we're making here because a lot of people retroactively want to veer away from Grath's influence on the scene. And I think it's important to see how Rick Doblin was describing his relationship with Grath and his centrality to the project here.
[30:20] So this is a talk that Rick Doblin gave for the California Institute of Integral Studies in October of 2014. Stannislov Gra's contributions to FDA drug development and research with psychedelics. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Doblin. Thank you. The tribute here to Stan is really well timed because 4 days from now my father turns 88 and I feel that Stan is my professional and spiritual father. So I'm able to be celebrating both of them in very close proximity. So just note up top of how he personally describes Stan Grath's influence on him. We'll cut to around the 23 minute mark here. he gets a little bit further into Stan's influence on the whole project and then in the actual therapeutic approach in the treatment manual again we've learned from Stan and so what we're primarily doing is a nondirective approach believes in the inner healer
[31:21] The wisdom of the psyche we're not the guide we're the sitter the supporter and we let it come and emerge from the psyche from the person themselves we have this fundamental trust that's really hard to have without going through it and which I drew a lot of strength from Stan and Christina and others is that if you can learn to trust this death rebirth process when you feel like you're about to die you're not going to come back you could go crazy if you can just let go and let something happen as return the funeral p is letting fully experiencing it that's super hard to do it's really scary but that's kind of the essence of the treatment approach and we use a male female co-therapist team.
[32:07] So you can see there he's discussing that Stan Grath techniques are the essence of MAPS's treatment approach. You've done a lot of research into Grath's techniques and we put out a video not too long ago of one of your talks on sort of telepathy and psychedelic therapy and things like that. Can you speak to a little bit of what Rick's talking about there? Yeah, just to kind of briefly explain it because it's a lot of jargon and euphemisms in the description there, but having read a great deal of graph, I can kind of translate what the therapy entails that he's describing. Essentially during a psychedelic dosing session, the idea is that the therapist, the facilitator can attune telepathically to what is emerging from the clients, the patients unconscious.
[32:58] And that this concept of the inner healing intelligence that graph uses and that maps took into their therapy model describes a like once your ego is out of the way, your ordinary sense of self, your inner healing intelligence starts to bring up all of this past trauma that you've had according to the theory that you've had in your past. and that the facilitator's job is to accentuate and amplify the traumatic experiences, including role playinging using physical struggle. And you've described Gra's approach in pseudoscientific terms in the past. We're talking past experiences in his description go all the way back to your birth memories, all the way back to past life regressions.
[33:47] Is that correct as well? I would say it's more of a new religious movement than it is a evidence-based psychotherapy. The idea is that you, you know, we're all connected on a level of reality beyond our individual selves and that you can connect back to your birth trauma to traumas that existed before you were born and process those. And it's probably also worth noting that the I mentioned there's the physical struggle. The facilitator will often stand in acting as the perpetrator in past trauma as the client is screaming no and get your hands off me. Yeah. And as a final clip just to illustrate to the audience how influential Gra has been on the psychedelic scene.
[34:34] I have one last clip here. It's about a minute long of Rick Doblin at psychedelic science 2023 describing Gra's influence on the scene. And just listen to the reaction it produces from the crowd here. counselor took me seriously and I was so fortunate that he gave me a book to read by Stan Grath and this book was Realms of the Human Unconscious observations from LSD research. Reading that book changed my life and it made me devote myself to psychedelics to try to bring back psychedelic research and Stan has been my mentor ever since. He is the through line from the psychedelic research in the 50s and then after the crackdown to developing holotropic breath work which demonstrates that these experiences are in us.
[35:21] They're not just in the pill. They're natural to us. And then he has trained most of the many of the new psychedelic therapists as well. And we are so lucky that he is here with us today. and [cheering] and now and let's all wish him a happy birthday. He turns 92 on July 1. I love you Stanita. It's really Stan is the pioneer. Stan is the one. And so you can see there the through line between the research in the 50s to the current modern psychedelic therapy movement is how Rick describes Dan. And now that we kind of understand Stan's role in the history and influence on psychedelic therapy and psychedelic research in the modern day, we should probably dive a little bit deeper into his views on homosexuality and treating homosexuality with his techniques.
[36:22] In 2025, the past writings of Stan Gra were called into question for their framing of homosexuality and the treatment of homosexual behaviors. Many of Gra's works over the years, he described homosexuality as a sexual deviation that resulted from trauma and that that deviation could be changed or potentially even cured using psychedelic treatments. And so he did not use the term or the phrase conversion therapy, but he was presenting the justification for using it in that context. Yeah. And in fact, you can see in books of his throughout the years that he references homosexuality alongside other pathologies like schizophrenic psychosis and agitated depression, etc., etc.
[37:10] This is from his 1985 book beyond the brain in which he associates a number of what he describes as mental disorders under the basic perinatal matrices that they're associated with. In his framework, a basic perinatal matrices maps how the physical and emotional stages of the birth process translate into foundational psychological imprints that influence human consciousness, behavior, and worldviews throughout life. So here you can see under BPM3, which also lists schizophrenic psychosis, agitated depression, male homosexuality is also listed. And under BPM4, which also has schizophrenic psychosis, messionic delusions, female homosexuality is listed alongside those disorders as well.
[38:01] This is a graphic depiction of some of those basic perinatal matrices as described by Grath. The amniotic universe, the cosmic oppression, the struggle of death, rebirth, the experience of death, rebirth, traumatic experiences that occur during any of these phases. the ideas that leaves an imprint on you that continues on and informs the structure of your personality. In 2025, there was conversations happening throughout the psychedelic space about Grath's influence and he decided to respond to some of the questioning of his past writings on homosexuality and views on the treatment of homosexuality with psychedelics. published on MAPS website.
[38:47] Stan Grath put out an open letter that I'll pull up now that we can take a look at. So here, prior to the letter, MAPS, the multi-disiplinary association for psychedelic studies, founded by Rick Doblin, who we discussed earlier, writes that recently concerns have been raised about some of Dr. Stannislav Grath's past writings, which have been interpreted as framing queerness in ways that do not align with present- day understandings of human sexuality and identity. We acknowledge that our publication of these writings, maps has published and sold many of Sandra's books without publicly addressing these concerns inadvertently contributed to pain and misunderstanding. For this, we sincerely apologize. These passages have been removed from the republication of Stan's books.
[39:33] And then they go on to share the open letter that Stan Grath wrote. So I'll take a read through that right now and we can discuss. Stan wrote, "Members of the LGBTQIA+ community and others have brought to my attention that several of my published writings discuss homosexuality as a psychological disorder. My early writings were crafted in the context of my psychoanalytic training and were written in a time when many, if not most, cultures criminalized same gender behaviors with incarceration a real threat to those who acted on their natural attractions. I was seeking to understand this aspect of humanity from a deeper perspective than mere criminalization. Although I neglected to publicly correct these statements until now, I want to be very clear that I have long considered same gender attraction a healthy expression of human sexuality.
[40:23] I am hopeful that those who have worked with me over the years have experienced my openness and love for all people with unwavering respect for individual sexual orientations and expressions. And so once this open letter was released, was that satisfactory to people in the psychedelic space or I mean I think many people who are on the gra bandwagon were happy with it, but there were notable examples of people who were not and they wrote a follow-up letter in response to this that we could take a look at. So the same month that that open letter was published by Grath, a reply was made. Yeah. It was co-authored by five individuals working in the field including Andrea Ans who we mentioned previously. So Sophens last week Dr. Stan Grath a giant in the field of psychedelic research published an open letter to the worldwide community addressing his writings on using psychedelics like LSD to treat LGBTQIA plus people.
[41:19] In an unsigned preface maps apologized for publishing homophobic content and noted that these passages have been removed from the republication of Stan's books. We commend them for this action. This public statement was anticipated. Over a year ago, we Alex Beller and Andrea Ens approached Dan Grath with our concerns and met with him, Breij and two other individuals. At the time, we presented him with a summary of the homophobia in his writings and requested that he reckon with this and issue a public apology. However, what Dr. Grath, who is a personal hero of ours, presented was wolffully inadequate. It misdates the time frame of his statements, suggesting they were all much older than they are. It offers only a conditional parenthesis nonapology, blaming readers for being confused rather than accepting responsibility, and it leaves the door open to Gra's work being used in conversion therapy.
[42:14] We invite Dr. Grath to continue this conversation and invite members of the field to reflect on whether long disproven claims about queer people may still be present in our work. This is not merely a case of outdated language that went unressed. Graph had a fully developed theory of homosexuality, referring to it as one, a sexual deviation, two a sexual disturbance, three a psychopathological syndrome, four a sexual pathology, and five an emotional disorder. I think it's notable as well there that those are all quotations between a wide range of years from 1988 through 2009. Yes, all of those years were beyond when homosexuality was removed from the DSM. And continuing in LSD doorway to the Numinous from 2009 and earlier works, Graph explicitly classifies homosexuality as a sexual deviation.
[43:08] He writes that quote sexual deviations, state of masochism, male homosexuality, drinking of urine, and eating of feces end quote from chapter 4 result from turbulent birth experiences. As a closeted gay teenager in the 1990s, I Beler read Gra's books. I was fascinated by his accounts of LSD visions and frankly terrified by his diagnosis of my own sick, deviant condition. What does Grath write about how he treated male homosexuals? Grath blends traditional psychoanalytic theory with his own transpersonal ideas. He traces male homosexuality to quote an unfinished gestalt of a previous incarnation as a female end quote suggesting that we look to past lives to understand why someone is gay. He writes that male homosexuality is rooted in quote castration fears or a quote life-threatening vagina dentata reprising a common misogynist psychoanalytic trope.
[44:02] By contrast, Grath portrays lesbianism as less dire and more easily remedied. Skipping down a bit, when I Beler have spoken about psychedelic conversion therapy at conferences, people often doubt that Grath practiced it as they know him to be a kind and well-meaning person. This comports with my own experiences with the man. Yet, conversion therapy need not be malicious. It is often carried out by those believing they are helping, but who are blinded by their own internalized homophobia. In a book as recent as 2009, Grath described his work with young men presenting with distress about being gay and ending up having heterosexual experiences with the opposite sex as success stories. He also recounts experiences of lesbian women in similar situations as success stories. As the letter goes on, they emphasize how far into the 21st century these statements continued, that this wasn't just about his early writings, as we already emphasized.
[44:56] They go on to note specific omissions and rhetorical choices that undermined the letter from Grath, including conditional non-apology, framing harm as confusion, reassuring only heterosexual patients about their worry of becoming homosexual and then no real reckoning as they frame it. They highlight that Grath's work as it stands could be used as a basis for the incorporation of psychedelics into conversion therapies in the present day. And they refer to the Supreme Court's review of Colorado's ban on conversion therapy, noting that if it prevails, which it did, psychedelic conversion therapy could be allowed again in all 50 states. In response to this open letter, Gra had a follow-up that was appended at the end of his original letter on the MAPS website.
[45:44] Gra wrote, "Earlier this year, MAPS published my open letter to the LGBTQ plus and world community apologizing for portions of my writing that discuss homosexuality as a psychological disorder. As noted in the open letter, these passages were based on my psychoanalytical training in the 1950s and early 1960s when homosexuality was considered a psychological disorder. During this time period, referrals for psychological treatment in some instances helped people avoid incarceration who faced criminal charges for homosexual behavior. Even in that situation, I never promoted my work or held my work as involving treatment for homosexuality. I have been told that my prior statement was received by some people as equivocal. Again, to be clear, I take full responsibility for the harm my writings have caused, and I support the removal of passages pathizing homosexuality from future editions of my books.
[46:36] He describes his more recent books as inadvertent republications of previous works and previous content. The letter then moves on into a much more defensive orientation, stating that over the years, several statements and writings, including the open letter that we were just looking at, have asserted a false narrative about the nature of my work and character. While I acknowledge the harm my writing has caused, I feel the need to provide additional context and respond to address these false narratives. He explains why these passages were republished in the 21st century as he was really busy. He says, "Unfortunately, the reality of reprinting by publishing companies along with the demands of my professional life meant that I did not attend closely to reprinting." But that to me is it's something that we hear a lot from people who have a lot of privilege that they are just, you know, I didn't get to it when like the harms are falling disproportionately on marginalized groups.
[47:30] You heard that recently with the, you know, people who took money from Epstein saying that, well, you know, I just hadn't looked into it and kind of giving these excuses even though they were helping to normalize Epstein and rehabilitate his image, which put people at risk afterwards. It's those types of decisions that cause systemic problems to just continue on in many cases, right? I didn't have time to look into it, but my books were republished and sold and I continued making money off of the language in them. Just never really got around to it. It's a kind of a bizarre excuse. And of note, this is, you know, published on MAP's website. And that's very similar to the excuse that they gave when there was that abuse that occurred in their phase 2 clinical trials. And they were asked once you knew that something had happened, why didn't you review the videotapes of the sessions to see, especially since if one patient was abused, you'd ideally want to check what else had happened with these therapists.
[48:28] And their answer that I heard firsthand at conferences over the years was that they just didn't have time to get to it was was one of the answers that they gave. And he goes on to continue defending himself, saying that the aspect he found most troubling about the criticism in the open letter we looked at was the assumption that I held prejudices against the LGBTQ plus people. and even continuing into the present. It's like why would anyone assume you didn't when you're publishing books and continuing to publish books that people like the writer of that open letter mentioned he was reading in the '9s and intaking and worrying about his own condition because of your writings. Like why would anyone not think that based on the fact that you're too busy to update any of these as they're being republished and republished?
[49:17] Well, this is another pattern that we see in the psychedelic field where people are very convinced that they're good people and that they're here for healing and for saving the planet in some cases that when you try to point out systemic harms, the person identifying those harms is framed as the as in the wrong because obviously they know they're good people. How dare you accuse them of being homophobic, for example? And it's a very privileged way of looking at things. Like his descriptions were overtly homophobic, but you know that that doesn't mean that he intended ill on a conscious level, but he is still perpetuating ideas that have this systemic effect.
[50:06] And this is widespread across not just on this issue, but other issues like trying to call attention to patterns of abuse and psychedelic therapy as well. Yeah. And the letter just continues to defend himself against the open letter that was written, taking issue with the fact that his name was associated with conversion therapy and the passages that we just looked at in which he describes the conversion experience as success being associated with conversion therapy. He takes issue with. He says that there's no point in my own career where I advocated for or practiced conversion therapy. I don't think he would call it that obviously, but in practice what he was writing was conversion therapy. Yeah. And that's the thing I mean like when I, you know, have described this group as a therapy cult in some of my writings, people are very offended by that.
[51:00] And yet, you know, no therapy cult will see what they're doing as a cultic kind of a practice. you can be fully intending well but if what you're doing is participating in this broader pattern then that is the issue and I guess the distinction that he's making is that he feels that he is just responding to what people want and like you know is not imposing anything but the ideas the system of ideas is still implying that there is a deviation and that psychedelics can address that deviation. Yeah, he's still very much pathized homosexuality throughout his writings and framed them as the result of something that happened in their past or something with a cause that can be discovered as the root of an issue, not just some natural way of being like he wants people to retroactively look at his works with the assumption of.
[52:00] Yeah. So, it's to me it's a distinction without any meaningful difference. And he goes on to continue to just make the defense that all he was doing was writing about a DSM categorized pathology and he didn't have some like larger cosmological reason for homosexuality, which is absolutely what he actually did have. Yeah. He ends the letter essentially by fully denouncing any attempt to use psychedelics or any form of therapy to try to change someone's sexual orientation or gender. So after a string of defenses, he did come out and say that they did pry that from him. He does strongly request that the people who wrote the open letter stop saying that he engaged in conversion therapy.
[52:45] And he also emphasizes due to his age and life circumstances. He won't be commenting further on this issue. Yeah. and essentially leaves it at that, writing he that he has great respect for all members of the LGBTQ plus community and asks to be treated with the same respect in future public statements. That to me is so emblematic of like you know how we've been treated as well where it's like when you are calling attention to systemic patterns and even unintentional harms that will at scale disproportionately harm marginalized groups that is treated as harassment of some kind as an attack. People in this field have a very difficult time seeing critique as a positive contribution which to my mind does not bode well for their ability to responsibly navigate the very challenging terrain that this field is building into under this current administration.
[53:39] Just before we leave from that context, I mean, it is to me noteworthy that those researchers didn't seem to have any issues with all the other problems in Gra's work, including what I mentioned previously of using concerted strength to physically roleplay assaults when people are in altered states of consciousness as people are shouting for it to stop. And there's also very disturbing descriptions of women throughout concerning gender biases that are described throughout his writings that don't fall under the homosexuality framework, but that are still deeply problematic. And the field as a whole has not reckoned with the range of problems with Grath's work and their ongoing influence on the field. Yeah. It's like you can want Grath to reckon with his conversion therapy treatment or his views on homosexuality in the past, but do you want him to reckon with the fact that he is also endorsing past life trauma and birth trauma, which isn't supported at all by evidence-based research either?
[54:40] Like that's the that's what this is the person that a lot of the main figures in this space are saying is the root of the modern psychedelic therapy movement and who even the people in the open letter were saying was a huge inspiration to them. It's disturbing that we're not reckoning with the other general pseudocientific issues with Grath's research as well. Yeah. Because it's like to me this should have been a moment for people to ask, you know, what does this say about Grath's work as a whole rather than to address this narrow part of it. Now that you're up to speed on the history of conversion therapy in psychedelic research, tune in for the next episode where we're going to explore more modern ideologies around the thinking of queerness and transness and homosexuality pathized as a disease.
[55:26] Where some of these ideologies are coming from and some of the biggest figures on the right-wing promoting these ideologies.
