Radiolab - UnErased: Dr. Davison and the Gay Cure

Today on Radiolab, we're playing part of a series that Jad worked on called UnErased: The history of conversion therapy in America. The episode we're playing today, the third in the series, is one of the rarest stories of all: a man who publicly experiences a profound change of heart. This is a profile of one of the gods of psychotherapy, who through a reckoning with his own work (oddly enough in the pages of Playboy magazine), becomes the first domino to fall in science’s ultimate disowning of the “gay cure.” UnErased is a series with Focus Features, Stitcher and Limina House in conjunction with the feature film, BOY ERASED. Special thanks go out to the folks at Anonymous Content for their support of UnErased. If you want to hear the whole series, you can find UnErased in all the usual podcast places. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Duration: 43m
Broadcast on: 21 Nov 2018
Audio Format: other

Today on Radiolab, we're playing part of a series that Jad worked on called UnErased: The history of conversion therapy in America.

The episode we're playing today, the third in the series, is one of the rarest stories of all: a man who publicly experiences a profound change of heart. This is a profile of one of the gods of psychotherapy, who through a reckoning with his own work (oddly enough in the pages of Playboy magazine), becomes the first domino to fall in science’s ultimate disowning of the “gay cure.”

UnErased is a series with Focus Features, Stitcher and Limina House in conjunction with the feature film, BOY ERASED. Special thanks go out to the folks at Anonymous Content for their support of UnErased.

If you want to hear the whole series, you can find UnErased in all the usual podcast places.

Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

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They're listening to radio lab from WNYC. Hey Robert. Yes. Welcome from a long desperate slumber, Robert Crowe, which opens his left eye then his right. Alerted to the presence of genital blood. Hey Robert. Yeah. Okay. That's you. I have a thing I would like to share with you and then by extension, the people out there. What would you like to share, something you've been mulling? Yeah. So I recently completed a sort of mini series in conjunction with a film that's now out in the world called Boy Erased for a project that we called Unerased, which people can hear. Yeah, put it out for episodes. It's out there in the world, in the wild, on iTunes, Spotify, all the places. And I want to play you one of the four today, because I think it's just, I think, I think it'll honestly, I should probably say I've heard them as it happens. Yes. Here's the things that sort of, I found sort of just about the third one. That's our first one. Here's a really important moment in American history. I guess you'd have to say in American cultural history. And it almost feels like a single individual walks into one room and says something startling to a group of very important people, because of an accidental moment that he just happened to be over here talking a scholarly conversation. So by a crazy quilt of serendipity, enormous changes come out. Now, this may be oversimplifying it, and I'm sure there's a lot else going on, deeper and shallower rhythms, but the changes come almost by accident because someone misses a train. Yeah. Yeah. That's a pretty good tease. There you go. There you go. Okay. So can we play it? Yeah, let's play it. This is Unerased, a new podcast that reveals the hidden history of conversion therapy in America. I'm Jad Abumrod. This is episode three. Let's start this episode by talking about one of the great successes in psychology. If you're living with a mental health problem, it can be hard to know which way to turn or what to do to feel better. It's called CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. You hear about it sometimes in the news around treatments for PTSD, like suppose a soldier is triggered by a loud sound.

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