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The Supreme Court heard oral argument in Chiles v. Salazar yesterday, a culture war-y case about Colorado’s law banning talk therapists from discussing “conversion therapy” with minor clients.
The oral argument ended up hinging on a different culture war question: is strictly talk therapy – without prescriptions, shocks, clinical analysis, official diagnosing, whatever – inherently medical? I.e., is addressing “mental health” through conversation really “health” at all, or is it something far simpler?
Colorado admitted a priest or a life coach could have the very conversations that it was banning therapists from partaking in; why would the difference in title suddenly change the classification of the act itself?
Some arguments tried to say that talk therapy is medical conduct because it triggers a physiological reaction in the brain, but all speech has the capacity to do that – someone telling you they love you can release dopamine and oxytocin; someone telling you “gross, no” after you ask them on a date can create a crushing response; etc. And yet, speech in a general sense continues to receive protections that conduct does not.
Does “medicine” need to be something that physically manipulates and alters the body? Does medicine need to be something directed towards solving an illness?
I can see the argument that mental health as addressed through a clinical diagnosis and prescriptions is medicine. But I am struggling to understanding talk therapy as falling into the medical category, in part because much of talk therapy isn’t related to the prevention, treatment, or cure of mental illness – a lot of talk therapy is simply asking for help with a difficult relationship, achieving a deeper understanding of self, or venting to someone who is trained to recognize self-perception road blocks.
Taking the view that medicine is about preventing/treating illness, it would be especially odd to view conversion therapy conversations as medical – after all, society has moved past viewing same-sex attraction as a disease, supposedly. So why then would conversations about attraction be medical in nature in this context? Is it from a larger need for therapy to be considered health more broadly?
This perhaps a bit of a tangent, but for a while I have struggled with the idea of 'conversion therapy'.
At the one end, it's easy to understand a minimalist definition of it, and why treatments that meet that minimum definition should be banned - we're talking about things like using electric shocks to artificially create aversions to certain sexual stimuli.
On the other, I have seen the phrase 'conversion therapy' to refer to any kind of treatment or even just conversation around the idea of a person abstaining from same-sex sexual contact. Some time ago I read a document with some personal stories from two progressive Christians describing their experiences with 'conversion therapy', and in both cases the so-called conversion therapy was just another Christian telling them that they shouldn't have sex with someone of their own gender. That kind of maximalist definition of conversion therapy is clearly absurd, and would ban certain kinds of speech.
I feel as though I have seen this gambit many times and that it ought to have a name. Definitional expansion? You start with something that is obviously bad, and you have a word for the thing that's obviously bad - conversion therapy, violence, racism, genocide, child abuse, and so on. Then you want to draw attention to some issues that might be related to the bad thing, but don't quite fit under the same heading, so you just use the same word, but expand its meaning, hoping that the negative affect the word is already loaded with will come along with you. So meat is murder, or words are violence, or immigration is genocide, or your pastor telling you that homosexuality is bad is conversion therapy, or telling your kids that Santa Claus is real is child abuse. Trivial use of the word eventually weakens its meaning and even attempts to use it in the original context, for the obviously bad thing, fall flat. This is why telling Republicans that they're racist is pointless now.
I can understand the initial impulse, from the activist direction. If you want to expand a cause or mobilise people, trying to hook into their pre-existing moral logic is a good idea. "Meat is murder" is a cliché now and I think it's ineffective, but I can see how it is a shorthand for a serious moral argument: meat-eating depends upon killing living creatures in a way that a vegetarian could argue is morally analogous to murder. But the more you use that tactic, the weaker the words become, and you undermine yourself.
Is there a word for this process? Or at least something to say when you notice somebody doing it?
Concept creep.
Per Quillette, The Boy Who Inflated the Concept of 'Wolf'.
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