Conversion Therapy Costs U.S. Over $9 Billion a Year: Study
JAMA Pediatrics, the direct annual cost of SOGICE amounts to more than $650 million for services such as health insurance reimbursements and payments to religious organizations for performing the conversion therapies.
Indirect costs associated with the therapies, which include treatments for depression and substance abuse as well as suicide attempts, bring the total estimated economic burden to $9.23 billion.The study comes as some states have banned gender-affirming medical care and introduced legislation addressing transgender youth's participation in sports.
Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill has also drawn national attention in recent weeks for proposing that public school teachers be barred from discussing LGBTQ+ topics with young students."Sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts are dangerous, discredited practices rooted in false beliefs that being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning (LGBTQ) is pathologic," the study's authors wrote in JAMA Pediatrics. "This study suggests that, in addition to being detrimental from a clinical and humanistic standpoint, SOGICE and their harmful effects among LGBTQ youths in the U.S.
are estimated to cost billions of dollars each year."Over the years, some methods allegedly used for conversation therapy have included electric shock, deprivation of food, psychotherapy and hypnosis.
