Conversion therapy through Mormon BYU

Conversion Therapy at BYU: What the Historical Record Reveals About Institutional Practice and Personal Harm

For decades, Brigham Young University occupied a troubling position in the history of conversion therapy in America. While mainstream medicine abandoned such practices as ineffective and harmful, some BYU-affiliated practitioners continued offering aversion therapy to students struggling with same-sex attraction, often with institutional knowledge and tacit acceptance. Understanding this chapter of BYU's past is essential for anyone seeking to comprehend how institutional pressure, religious doctrine, and pseudoscientific medicine intersected to harm vulnerable students.

The question is not whether conversion therapy occurred near BYU's campus. The question is why it persisted so long, how many students underwent it, and what responsibility the university bears for what happened in those clinical settings.

Background: The Intersection of Religious Teaching and Medical Practice

Brigham Young University's institutional position on homosexuality has been unambiguous for generations. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that same-sex attraction itself is not sinful, but that acting on it is. This doctrine created profound psychological pressure for LGBTQ students attending the university, many of whom internalized shame about their identity and sought ways to change.

During the 1970s and 1980s, conversion therapy retained a veneer of scientific legitimacy that it lacks today. Major medical organizations had not yet formally denounced the practice, and fringe practitioners could still advertise aversion therapy as a legitimate treatment option. For students at a religiously conservative institution, the promise of clinical intervention, conducted by someone with medical credentials, offered false hope.