Shrink crap

This shrink in Northern Ireland who reckons he can magic gay people into straight people has had a go at defending himself.

He is Dr Paul Miller, who has been recommended by Iris Robinson, a Westminster MP, wife of Northern Ireland's First Minister and the chair of the Assembly's Health Committee, as a "lovely psychiatrist who works with me in my offices and his Christian background is that he tries to help homosexuals trying to turn away from what they are engaged in".

What they are engaged in? She makes it sound like some kind of drug-fuelled, riotous, incestuous sex at gunpoint in a graveyard at midnight with a corpse under the age of eight.

Anyway, this Pink News story says he's defended himself by saying that, while he doesn't assume that homosexuality is a mental disorder, "we simply treat those who ask for help with unwanted same-sex attraction".

And he can't see that his "Christian background" and attitude towards sexuality are the very things that will cause many gay people – especially religious ones – to feel guilty and then try to be "cured" in a "procedure" far more dangerous and potentially madness-inducing than being gay in the first place. It's a bit like saying the best cure for a headache is to have your head amputated.

Professor Michael King of the Royal Society of Psychiatrists is quoted as saying, "There is a lot of evidence going back 50 years to suggest that attempts to change people's sexuality in either direction are not possible. Such treatments do not work and can actually cause quite a lot of harm. Homosexuality is a state and a sexual orientation and is not a question of behaviour."

Meanwhile, the rabidly homophobic Christian Institue has weighed in, supporting Robinson, against whom two complaints have been made to police, and quoting this wretched woman's words to the BBC to the effect that she is the subject of a "witch hunt".

Witch? Well, if the cap fits, dearie . . .