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BYU doctoral student, aversion-therapy researcher

Max Ford McBride

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LGBTQ Latter-day Saints

BYU doctoral student, aversion-therapy researcher

McBride's 1976 BYU dissertation, 'Effect of Visual Stimuli in Electric Aversion Therapy,' is the single most-cited document in the aversion-therapy controversy. Seventeen men enrolled and fourteen completed treatment; subjects were shown male and female images while a plethysmograph measured arousal and electric shocks were administered. The study was supervised by D. Eugene Thorne, chair of BYU's psychology department and McBride's committee chairman.

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1976

Electric aversion therapy at BYUhinge

Max Ford McBride completed his dissertation 'Effect of Visual Stimuli in Electric Aversion Therapy' under D. Eugene Thorne, chair of BYU's psychology department. Seventeen men enrolled and fourteen completed treatment: a plethysmograph measured arousal while male and female images were shown, and electric shocks were administered in conjunction with certain images. Subjects set their own pain levels; the dissertation ranks the jolts on a scale from discrete to intolerable. Patients averaged about three months and up to twenty-two fifty-minute sessions. Participants signed releases acknowledging that damage to tissue or organs might occur. The independent Provo student paper the Seventh East Press later collected first-hand accounts: one former student described 'an electrical shock while viewing a pornographic picture of a male,' followed by a female image without shock, while a former BYU counselor called it 'aversive therapy - not shock treatment' using 'mild electric stimulus' and slides of men and women in various stages of dress.

Why this is a hingeIt is the hardest, most documentable instance of the therapeutic promise being carried out on actual bodies at the Church's own university.
Disputed FAIR stresses that subjects were volunteers whose same-sex attraction was contrary to their own desires, that BYU did not pioneer the method, and that the Church never mandated it; Connell O'Donovan and QSaltLake report that two participants died by suicide during the experiment, a claim the corpus does not independently verify.
People: Max Ford McBride · John Cameron

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