Low Cost Therapy in New York

Finding low cost therapy can be a great relief. Many people who are troubled by depression, anxiety, substance abuse or relationship difficulties are candidates for psychotherapy, but they may not be able to afford the high rates of many New York therapists. There is an easier way. Many of the analytic therapists at PPSC offer sliding scale rates for people who cannot afford the standard rates. That means that patients in search of low cost therapy can typically find a number of good options within our ranks.

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy, or analytic therapy, is an in-depth approach to uncovering and understanding the central issues in any person’s life. Analytic therapy is the most established approach in psychology, a mix of in-depth techniques that build understanding through a process of exploring important memories and emotions.

Our therapists understand that different needs must be met with different compromises. For the gold standard in low-cost and low-fee therapy in New York, please contact the affordable psychotherapists of PPSC today.

When Anxiety Strikes Young

It is not an uncommon sight these days: a teenager, laboring under the gargantuan expectations of today’s schools, suddenly struggling to breathe. The episode is just one of the many outward symptoms of an anxiety disorder; for other people, the issue can manifest as an ongoing sense of dread, panic or overwhelm. Because anxiety can strike at any age, many schools have found themselves hard-pressed to handle each case with the appropriate care:

School counselors and nurses alike have cited increased amounts of stress, pressure, social media, and divorce as causes for this surge in anxiety that has not only affected the teens who suffer but school administrators trying to help their students.

As one administrator put it:

Sevier said she now encounters students with anxiety on a “daily basis.” Thirty years ago, Sevier said she dealt with more “normal” teenage issues, such as conflicts with parents, friends, and significant others. Now, Sevier said she sees more severe cases of anxiety.

Some forms of anxiety respond well to drugs or cognitive-behavioral therapy. Other kinds of anxiety may require a more psychoanalytic approach, as patient and therapist together explore the early experiences that have given rise to the disorder.

Seeking anxiety therapy in New York gets easier when you can tap into a network of analytic therapists who have received special training in easing these symptoms. At PPSC, we are proud to offer low cost psychotherapy for teenagers and adults in search of a lasting solution to anxiety.

To learn more, please contact us here today.

Navigating Transference in Psychotherapy

Most of us who work in psychoanalytic psychotherapy owe a debt to Sigmund Freud, whose first steps defining the field shone a great light on the role of our unconscious minds. Freud’s body of work is not without its flaws, but his insights across a broad diversity of subjects have more or less stood the test of time. One of the issues Freud took particular interest in was the dynamic of the therapist’s office. Analytic therapists are generally discouraged from revealing too much about their personal lives, for fear of staining the therapeutic process with unwelcome details. As a recent New York Times piece described it:

In psychoanalysis, there is a specific rationale for this rule. The theory holds that patients tend to re-enact with therapists the relationships they had with their parents. This is called transference. By paying careful attention to this unfolding drama — as it plays out, right there in the office — the therapist and patient can uncover and resolve childhood conflicts. If a therapist interjects information about herself, she clouds the mirror and compromises the process.

Follow this story to its conclusion, however, and you can see how the benign neutrality of the therapist might come to be seen as a hindrance in some cases, even an act of hostility. In the case study within the piece, a patient desperately needs a sense of reciprocity, even a shallow one, in order to build the trust necessary to do the work:

As therapy continued with her, I heard how flat and tinny I sounded whenever I attempted to analyze what was going on between us. When I lapsed into too clinical a mode, our connection would wobble, and her alienation became palpable.

No two talk therapies are the same, and of course every psychoanalyst develops her own approach and rhythms. Learning and adapting is part of what makes an effective therapy worthwhile, for patient and therapist alike. If you’d like to embark on a journey to address longstanding feeling of depression, anxiety or loneliness, please contact the expert NYC therapists of PPSC today.

Talk Therapy Can Prevent Suicide

An interesting study caught our eye this week: researchers in Denmark followed many thousands of patients suffering with depression, and found that a number of good outcomes were associated with talk therapy:

For up to two decades, the new study followed people who’d attempted suicide once, and found their risk of future suicide declined by more than 25% if they’d received just six to 10 sessions of psychotherapy. Considering that people who have attempted suicide once are significantly more likely to contemplate it again, talk therapy – especially over an extended period of time – may hold a lot of promise for those in the most extreme form of mental pain.

It is an encouraging result which echoes a number of similar studies showing that talk therapy may be just as good as, and in some senses even more effective than, medication alone in the treatment of depression.

Interestingly, the effect was significant enough to persist even after several years:

The participants who’d taken part in talk therapy were 27% less likely to commit suicide again in the first year than people who didn’t have therapy—they were also 38% less likely to die of any cause. The difference was still the same after five years of follow-up, and even remained after 10.

Depression therapy, or psychotherapy aimed at alleviating the symptoms of depression, can take many forms, from cognitive behavioral techniques to more in-depth analytic therapy. Whether you are looking for standard or low-cost therapy, we invite you to contact the experts at PPSC today for a lasting solution to depressive feelings.

The Significance of Freud

Those of us who work in analytic therapy owe a great deal to Sigmund Freud, whose ideas brought grounding and energy to the discipline of modern psychology. Although many critics have rightly taken issue with some elements of Freud’s theories which no longer comport with enlightened gender politics, the balance of his foundational ideas remains as useful as ever. Now a new book has been published that explores this story in full: “Becoming Freud,” by Adam Phillips. This excellent NYT review uses the publication as a touchstone for a ranging conversation about the nature of mind. Our favorite quote follows. It’s long, but worth it:

The discovery of and exploration of the unconscious was the central drama of Freud’s life, the one thing he kept passionate faith with throughout private and professional vicissitudes. It was through attention to the unconscious that he made his major discoveries, the most important being that from birth to death we are, every last one of us, divided against ourselves. We both want to grow up and don’t want to grow up; hunger for sexual pleasure, dread sexual pleasure; hate our own aggressions — our anger, our cruelty, our humiliations — yet these are derived from the grievances we are least willing to part with. The hope of achieving an integrated self is a vain one as we are equally divided about our own suffering; we do in fact love it and want — nay, intend — never to relinquish it. What Freud found most difficult to cure in his patients, Phillips tells us, “was their (mostly unconscious) wish not to be cured.” There’s not an analysand in the world who will not recognize the bitter if profound truth of these words. As a historian of analysis once said, the best one can hope for in analysis is reconciliation, not cure. But oh! that reconciliation. What a gift it is.

Reconciliation and discovery remain hallmarks of psychotherapy, and we are proud to continue building on some of the most effective breakthroughs in our understanding of ourselves.

If you’d like to learn more about depression therapy, anxiety therapy, or low cost therapy in New York, please contact PPSC today.

The Death of Psychology? Not So Fast

A recent NPR story used this widely shared satirical article from The Onion as a touchstone to talk about something that rarely comes up in the media: is psychology science? Leave aside the overwhelming body of affirmative evidence amassed by social psychologists over many generations, and the empirical results netted by researchers who have confirmed the benefits of talk therapy. The bigger question is whether we can adequately describe the nuanced dynamics of our own minds, and whether there is any advantage to exploring the mind as something separate from the brain.

Since the mind makes its own patterns, evinces its own behaviors and finds its own predilections, is there any value to studying these on their own merits, as narratives and not numbers? The NPR piece takes a detailed look at various biases against the “hardness” of psychology of a science, before circling back to a familiar viewpoint:

Psychology is, in most ways, like any other science: It tackles easier and harder problems, and it faces empirical and conceptual challenges. It's hard but it's also important. Let's double our efforts, not doubt them.

Amen.

Is Your Closet a Window into Your Psyche?

It has been suggested many times that the home is a metaphor for the psyche. Some have even claimed that the master bedroom is a snapshot of your marriage, for instance, although others strongly contest this notion. This recent piece takes the idea of domicile as metaphor for the soul even further, unpacking the very notion of clutter as a window into something deeper:

Many powerful emotions are lurking amid stuff we keep. Whether it's piles of unread newspapers, clothes that don't fit, outdated electronics, even empty margarine tubs, the things we accumulate reflect some of our deepest thoughts and feelings.

This is, of course, often true. Yet just because the things we own can hold great significance doesn’t necessarily mean every room in your home is somehow a microcosm of your psychology. Sometimes clutter is just that, a function of poor organization or inadequate cleaning.

The real question is how to distinguish between the stuff that matters and the stuff that does not. They key is to pay attention to those things which arouse powerful emotions:

"Every time I think about getting rid of [my kids’ childhood things], I want to cry," says Ms. James, a 46-year-old public-relations consultant. She fears her children, ages 6, 8 and 16, will grow up and think she didn't love them if she doesn't save it all. "In keeping all this stuff, I think someday I'll be able to say to my children, 'See—I treasured your innocence. I treasured you!' "

Hoarding and its offshoots can be useful touchstones for analytic therapy. If there are things in your life that you find yourself helpless to purge or pack, then those things may be used to help explore that which you treasure most closely. At the very least, discussing them can be a helpful starting point to address some of the emotional triggers which continue to influence your life.

To learn more about the intersection between clutter, feelings and fulfillment, please contact the psychotherapists of New York’s PPSC today.

On Buddhism, Mindfulness and Psychoanalytic Therapy

We have written before about the subject of mindfulness in psychotherapy, especially since a growing body of literature suggests that both paradigms may have something to teach one another. Although they share a common goal of contentment, it has been noted that the two approaches are in a sense mirrors of one another:

The main challenge for each side in this dialogue is resisting the temptation to swallow the other. It's easy for a therapist to reject Buddhist awakening as an escapist fantasy, and just as easy for Buddhists to dismiss a psychotherapeutic focus on relationship problems as obsessing with past events rather than realizing one's true nature and living fully in the present. This temptation is aggravated by the fact that the cultural and historical gap between them is so great, which tends to activate Eurocentrism ("the intellectually imperialistic tendency in much Western scholarship to assume that European and North American standards and values are the center of the moral and intellectual universe," according to Jeffrey Rubin) or to idealize Orientocentrism ("the idealizing and privileging of Asian thought--treating it as sacred--and the neglect if not dismissal of the value of Western psychological perspectives"). If we are honest with ourselves, most of us have a bias favoring one side or the other.

This excellent and scholarly piece discusses some ways to resolve this tension, which would seem a worthy goal considering how many psychotherapists practice some elements of mindfulness and meditation. It is especially important because meditation and analytic therapy are directed at somewhat different issues; psychotherapy is concerned with causes, while mindfulness is concerned more with present experience.

[M]ore than a generation of Buddhist practice by committed Western students has made it apparent that meditation by itself is sometimes insufficient to resolve deep-rooted psychological problems and relationship difficulties. In its own short history the psychotherapeutic tradition has gained considerable insight into the mechanisms of denial, rationalization, repression, projection, and so forth, which can help us understand how Buddhist practice sometimes goes wrong--for example, the complicated transference/countertransference that can distort the relationship between therapist and client (or between teacher and disciple).

Of course both approaches show benefits, and both are concerned with liberating the mind from its tortures. There is also no question that mindfulness comes with great benefits, just as psychoanalytic therapy does.

Here at PPSC, we offer an eclectic approach to talk therapy that combine both schools of thought, and that constantly strives for the very latest ideas to help our patients. Contact us today to learn how you can effectively incorporate mindful approaches into your therapy.

Pulling Back the Curtain on Psychoanalytic Therapy

Many people have long been curious about the world of psychoanalytic therapy and psychoanalysis. Recently we published an introductory take on the subject from a major national media source. Now we have this interesting photo essay: a look inside the offices of psychoanalysts around the world, by photographer Mark Gerald. His interest in the subject is more than idle:

As an adult, Gerald realized that few people get to see inside the world of psychoanalysis, a sphere often obscured by its confidential nature and clouded by outdated stereotypes. “I found psychoanalysis extremely vibrant and current and yet it was being talked about in popular culture and some mental health circles as very passé—something of the 19th century, something that had really seen its heyday and was over. I didn't feel that way,” he said.

It is a fascinating look inside the environments analysts create to encourage sharing, trust, and emotional work, many of which are distinctively designed to inspire associations and new avenues:

For the full gallery, click here. To find a therapist in New York who can offer the many benefits of a psychoanalytic approach, start your search at PPSC today.

Should Psychotherapy Live Inside an App?

Is therapy is simple as asking short questions and receiving pithy answers? Some entrepreneurs seem to think so, including the founders of Talkspace, a text-messaging app that facilitates contact between patients and therapists via short, anonymous messages. Advocates of texting therapy point to the many benefits of this approach, including its potential to help patients reach out from remote locales, its anonymity (which could help some patients get over a fear of being judged), and its extreme affordability:

"Some users suffer from self-harm — cutting — so they can write to our therapist and say, ‘I have an urge to cut myself now, what should I do?'", says Roni Frank, a former computer scientist turned therapist. "There's nothing else out there like that." She thinks the immediacy that's built into the app is beneficial for people in crisis.

Yet dire emergencies and instant advice are not exactly the stuff of substantive therapy, which relies strongly on intimate connections and extended sessions. Indeed, any therapy which can be reduced to 160 characters or less is probably closer to the purview of life coaches than to the process of investigation and discovery that analytic therapy is for.

Most new products arise to fill a need, of course, and there is no doubt that Talkspace has struck a nerve for of its simplicity. Here at PPSC, we understand it isn’t always easy to find a therapist who suits your needs, and whose rates you can afford. That’s why we offer a number of ways for patients to find low cost therapy, and to explore convenient hours in their day.

If you’d like to learn more about the many benefits of old-fashioned face-to-face psychoanalytic psychotherapy, please contact us today.

Relationship Therapy at PPSC

A good relationship can be an essential component of a fulfilling life. Couples who struggle, or misunderstand each other, or devolve into resentment often have trouble staying together. Yet if there remains a base level of trust and intimacy, many couples have a chance of survival. At PPSC, we offer relationship therapy that emphasizes resolving the emotional issues that keep us apart from those we love. Often personal issues from earlier in life can color intimate relationships, where they wreak havoc with communication and drive us to enact dynamics that don’t really belong in the present. The goal of analytic therapy is to surface and understand these forces better, and to master them through this understanding.

As part of our abiding commitment to this relationship therapy, we occasionally host workshops for treatment professionals who want to grow more adept at identifying and improving the issues their couples patients face. One recent presentation, entitled, “Collaborative Couples Therapy: Turning Fights Into Intimate Conversations,” covered some material our therapists have found useful:

The central therapeutic task is to move couples out of their spiral of alienation–their adversarial or withdrawn state–and into a cycle of connection. The therapist creates intimate conversations by bringing into the couple dialogue the haunting feelings that each partner struggles with alone.

The PPSC Annex consistently hosts some of the most engaging and effective seminars in New York City. If you’d like to learn more about relationship therapy or continuing education in psychotherapy, please contact us today.

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the Huffington Post

It’s not often that the mainstream media takes a moment to pause and define psychoanalytic therapy for the masses. Although this form of therapy has been considered the gold standard in for more than 100 years, these days analytic therapy is often drowned out by glitzy headlines touting the latest discoveries in neurobiology. Yet talk therapy remains a timeless asset for many people, one unlikely to be replaced by chemical regimens anytime in the near future. This recent piece explains the practice and benefits of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, beginning with a wonderfully succinct definition up front:

Your unconscious thoughts and feelings affect what you do without your even knowing it. When you're unaware that it's happening, you can feel and do things and not know why. This can lead to anxiety, depression, difficulties with relationships, and problems with self-esteem -- all caused by things going on in your unconscious mind. Bringing them into awareness can help you to understand them, rather than be controlled by them. This is what psychodynamic psychotherapy is all about.

The full article is a very clean and lucid piece of writing that should help anyone interested in learning more about analytic therapy.

If you’d like to find a New York therapist trained in psychodynamic techniques, please contact the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Study Center today.

Are Stressful Relationships…Fatal?

For the second week in a row here at PPSC, we are delving into the thorny question of how relationships influence mental health. Last week saw a discussion of the various ways having a stable partner can relieve neurotic tendencies; now we have the converse, a new study which suggests stressful relationships actually shorten your life. The article in question was published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. Danish researchers gave nearly 10,000 people a standard questionnaire about how often they experience conflict with friends, neighbors, family members and other people. A longitudinal follow-up found a strong correlation:

Eleven years later, 422 of them were no longer living. That’s a typical number. What’s compelling, Rikke Lund and her colleagues at University of Copenhagen say, is that the people who answered "always" or "often" in any of these cases were two to three times more likely to be among the dead. (And the deaths were from standard causes: cancer, heart disease, alcohol-related liver disease, etc.—not murder. . .)

The question with all associations like this is which is the chicken and which the egg. Do conflict-ridden relationships lead to early death, or do people who instigate conflicts already suffer from poor health, when then drives the conflicts? Although the researchers applied the standard regressive statistical tools to determine what was going on here, the study’s design still doesn’t really answer these basic questions.

Yet the correlation is powerful. Stress and conflict are clearly associated with poor health and diminished life spans. It would make sense, then, to take active steps to repair combative relationships and end destructive ones. One of the easiest ways is to do so is to understand yourself better.

PPSC offers focused relationship therapy as part of an ongoing commitment to analytic therapy in New York. If you want to understand where your conflicts come from and why they seem to persist no matter how hard you work, contact us today to learn how you can find a therapist in New York.

How a Successful Relationship Quiets the Mind

It is hardly news to suggest that neurotic people find comfort in being loved. People who struggle with depression, anxiety and OCD often experience isolation as a result of these conditions. Sharing them with a partner who can withstand such gale force emotions is often a great relief. Now someone has studied just how great this relief can be. A study published in the Journal of Personality followed several couples over many months to see how they handled neurotic behavior. The results were encouraging:

The scientists found that, while in a romantic relationship, neurotic behavior seemed to gradually decrease over time . . . For one thing, they receive support from each other, said Christine Finn. Secondly, the world of inner thought plays a crucial role: “The positive experiences and emotions gained by having a partner change the personality — not directly but indirectly — as at the same time the thought structures and the perception of presumably negative situations change,” Finn said.

Of course these researchers have ignored the far thornier question of how to land a stable relationship when you feel like a fragile and self-admonishing bundle of nerves.

At PPSC, we offer relationship therapy to help bridge this gap, offering patients the tools they need to make sense of their romantic relationships. Issues such as frequent arguments and problems of trust are often the product of each individual’s emotional history.

If you’d like to build healthy relationships and discover more productive ways to work through difficulties with your partner, please contact the New York relationship therapy experts of PPSC today.

Shining Light on Suicide

Suicide is the single most anguished gesture a person can make. Friends and family left behind often find themselves struggling to make sense of the act – was it a cry of shame, or pain, or fear, or perhaps just a function of emotional exhaustion? Specialists in psychology know that suicide is intimately associated with depression, which is one reason so many careful questions are asked whenever depression warrants hospitalization. Yet these efforts have generally failed to reduce the overall rate of suicide in America, which has risen sharply over the last two decades. Now a new population of people is speaking up for their chance to help: those who have tried, and failed, to take their own life:

Plans for speakers bureaus of survivors willing to tell their stories are well underway, as is research to measure the effect of such testimony on audiences. For decades, mental health organizations have featured speakers with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression. But until now, suicide has been virtually taboo, because of not only shame and stigma, but also fears that talking about the act could give others ideas about how to do it.

There is no doubt that fellowship and community have been established to provide comfort to many people with mental health issues. Although such fellowships are only moderately successful with compulsive acts like addiction, they may prove more successful for disorders like depression, which are often marked by a pervasive sense of isolation.

If you are someone you know is struggling with feelings of despair, PPSC offers depression therapy that may help to lift the heavy burden of chronic emotional pain. Call us today to learn more.

Is Sluggish Cognitive Tempo a Thing?

The DSM remains a source of perpetual controversy, not just within the field of psychiatry, but within the press and public as well. It isn’t hard to see why. With its dogmatic tone and Orwellian self-certitude, this foundational document bears all the hallmarks of a holy text rendered into the scientific milieu. But the DSM is also unfairly maligned at times. As a touchstone for useful analytic therapy and psychiatric care, the manual has undoubtedly helped millions of people discover and name what ails them. The DSM has also been a tool of political progress over time, not least in its evolution over LGBT identity and recognition.

But now a new diagnosis is banging at the gates. A number of doctors are telling the public that we must accept a brand new attention disorder: Sluggish Cognitive Tempo, or SCT. Never mind that the name seems ripe for revision in the very near future (sluggish?), the diagnosis itself remains frustratingly vague. It describes, in the broadest sense, those who “tune out” or daydream, causing them to lose focus without any hyperactivity.

Some people are unhappy with this idea, and many of them have a pretty good argument that this latest malady may be little more than a rearguard effort by pharmaceutical companies to sell us more pills. Attentional deficit disorders as a group are already somewhat controversial, as few prescribing doctors ever bother to discuss subtler behavioral solutions such as improving sleep patterns before they reach for the pad. (We have learned the lesson many times before that prevention is always safer than prescription; consider this example from the world of orthopedic medicine.)

And there is this:

Yet some experts, including Dr. McBurnett and some members of the journal’s editorial board, say that there is no consensus on the new disorder’s specific symptoms, let alone scientific validity. They warn that the concept’s promotion without vastly more scientific rigor could expose children to unwarranted diagnoses and prescription medications — problems that A.D.H.D. already faces.

Daydreaming is simply what we do in childhood, and it’s unclear whether some people do so much of it that it should be pathologized. Until we know, it is probably best to let nature run its course, engage in talk therapy wherever it may help, and medicate only as a last resort.

More Reasons to Seek Therapy for Anxiety

Epidemiological studies are often poorly designed and prone to later reversals, so conclusions based on large cohort studies should be taken with a grain of salt. Still, the results of a recent large-scale analysis showed a stark danger associated with taking anti-anxiety medications for a long time, compared with people who had similar symptoms but took no such medication:

For more than seven years, researchers followed 34,727 people who filled prescriptions for anti-anxiety medications like Valium and Xanax, or sleep aids like Ambien, Sonata and Lunesta, comparing them with 69,418 controls who did not.

After adjusting for a wide variety of factors, the researchers found that people who took the drugs had more than double the risk of death.

There is no question that these drugs are life-savers for some people, and there is no question that anxiety can have biological precipitants. But studies such as this one also underscore the relative safety of anxiety therapy, especially analytic therapy designed to root out and resolve some of the emotional causes of pervasive fear and dread.

If you have tried medicine and found it lacking, or you simply want a better way to address the causes instead of the symptoms of your anxiety, please contact the New York anxiety experts at PPSC today.

Depression in Young Athletes

An interesting recent article in The Atlantic highlights what has become something of an invisible epidemic: depression among elite college athletes. National trends point to declining mental health among undergraduates across the board:

[T]he American College Health Association reported in 2013 that 31.3 percent of undergraduates surveyed felt “so depressed it was difficult to function,” and 7.4 percent admitted to seriously considering suicide.

Athletes are no different, of course. The article captures the dichotomy of what has become, for many young athletes, an unresolvable conflict between maintaining a warrior façade and crumbling within:

“I dreaded waking up. My body would ache. I felt physically sick,” he said. “It was very hard, as a man playing D1 football, to go to somebody and say ‘I’m having a hard time’,” Meldrum said. He marvels at his ability to have made it to practice every day while feeling so desperate. “Here I am, I’m feeling sick, I wished I would die, and I have to go out there and hit people.”

Depression is surprisingly easy to hide for some people, and college is the typical age that most clinical cases first arise. It is no wonder that college hides so many depressive students, both athletes and nonathletes alike. If you know someone struggling with clinical depression, it is essential to seek help.

We offer depression therapy that focuses on the origins and emotional factors behind this debilitating condition. Please reach out today to learn more.

When Depression Has Two Victims

A thoughtful new article in Scientific American addresses the many ways that depression can harm couples, upending the notion that depression is a solitary disorder. The article describes a number of shared repercussions that can follow from feelings of hopelessness and despair, tracing a vicious cycle:

A resounding body of research has shown how closely depression is related to relationships in a cyclical fashion: depression affects the quality of your relationships, and the features of your relationship can affect your level of depression. In other words, being depressed can cause you to pay less attention to your partner, be less involved, be more irritable or have trouble enjoying time together—all of which can cause your relationship to falter.

It’s worth reading the full piece for its taxonomy of depression-related problems that strike couples, including diminished sex drive, hopelessness about the relationship, a tendency to “act out,” and pervasive anxiety.

If you believe your relationship has suffered because of depression, it may be time to seek substantive analytic therapy. PPSC is one of the world’s foremost institutions for the study and treatment of depression, and we offer a number of extensive resources for those interested in excellent relationship therapy.

Click to start your search for a therapist in New York today.

How to Stop Gay Conversion Therapy

A number of news outlets have recently picked up on a national movement to outlaw so-called gay conversion therapy, a (usually) religiously-oriented process in which people attempt to “reprogram” homosexual urges. The practice is as abusive as it is ineffectual, of course, but some fault lines have developed over the question of whether a legal ban is the best way to combat this practice. An interesting discussion arose in the New York Times following this editorial, the thrust of which centered around First Amendment rights and a possible workaround:

The bans tread on a volatile question: the degree to which the First Amendment protects speech uttered by professionals, like doctors and lawyers, in the course of their work. . . .

There is a more promising way to put pressure on, or even shut down, conversion programs: existing state laws that forbid businesses and professionals to engage in deceptive practices.

Yet one letter writer addressed the singular way that the full force of law could help guide discussions and stigmatize bigotry where other methods might fail:

While there may be other possible avenues to bar so-called “conversion therapy” from practice, passing a law casts a wide net across all corners of the state and sends a strong message to all that this damaging practice, widely discredited by reputable medical and mental health institutions, has no place in our state.

It is an interesting argument that touches on issues of law, morality and freedom. What is not controversial is that gay conversion therapy is a regressive and traumatic practice which deserves no quarter anywhere in professional circles.

Here at PPSC, we take pride in an approach to LGBT friendly therapy that incorporates and values gay identity while exploring the specific issues that may trouble patients. Do you want to find a gay-friendly therapist in NYC? Start here.