I am writing to you today as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Certified Crisis Interventionist and mental health provider.  I urge you to act swiftly and decisively to ban conversion therapy.  Conversion Therapy is not a "therapy" at all.  Therapy seeks to affirm people in becoming their best selves.  What conversion therapy actually  is, is a thoroughly discredited practice without scientific basis. It has been opposed by the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the World Health Organization.

This guidance protects young people from state-licensed therapists in Virginia who falsely claim to parents and youth that being LGBTQ is a mental illness, and therefore taking advantage of parents and harming vulnerable youth.  The harmful practices of Conversion Therapy use shameful practices of rejection, and psychological abuse to attempt to shame youth into changing a part of themselves they cannot and ethically should not be asked to change.  Peer reviewed studies show that conversion therapy raises the risk of suicide in an already vulnerable cohort of youth.

I thank you for taking on this important update to practice guidance.  I look forward to practicing in a state where this harmful practice is banned.

Best, Elizabeth Schnelzer, LCSW