A conversion camp is a residential or intensive program that attempts to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, typically pressuring LGBTQ+ individuals to adopt heterosexual and cisgender identities. These programs fall under the broader umbrella of sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts (sometimes called conversion therapy, reparative therapy, or “ex-gay” ministry), which frame non-heterosexual or non-cisgender identities as disorders that can be “cured.” What happens inside these settings varies widely, from talk-based counseling sessions and religious rituals to far more extreme interventions, but the consistent thread across decades of research is that none of them work and all carry serious risk of harm.
How These Programs Define the “Problem”
At the core of every conversion camp is a shared premise: that being LGBTQ+ is a condition requiring treatment. Religion-based programs, which make up a large share of conversion efforts, frame all people as potential heterosexuals whose gender aligns with their birth sex, and cast any departure from that model as curable “sexual brokenness.”1Social Science & Medicine. Religious trauma and moral injury from LGBTQA+ conversion practices This framing matters because it shapes everything that follows. Participants are not simply told they should try to change. They are told that their identity is fundamentally disordered, that the change is possible, and that failure represents a personal or spiritual deficiency. The experience is not just a failed therapy. It is an environment that systematically invalidates a person’s sense of self.
The practice has also been situated within broader cultural and political attitudes toward non-heterosexuality, with some scholars noting how conservative religious movements have sustained these efforts even as mainstream science moved decisively away from treating homosexuality or gender diversity as pathology.2Social Sciences. Sexual Orientation Change Efforts, Conservative Christianity and Resistance to Sexual Justice
What Actually Happens Inside
The specific practices used in conversion programs have shifted over time, but certain categories persist. Historically, conversion efforts emerged from a medical and moral framework that pathologized non-heteronormative identities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Early practitioners within psychiatry and psychoanalysis employed techniques including psychoanalysis, aversive conditioning, electroconvulsive therapy, hormonal manipulation, and religious counseling.3The Journal of Sexual Medicine. Conversion Therapy: Historical Context and Enduring Harm Aversive conditioning, for instance, involved pairing same-sex attraction with painful or nauseating stimuli, such as electric shocks or drugs that induced vomiting, in an attempt to create a negative association.
Modern conversion camps rarely use electroshock (though isolated reports still surface). Instead, most rely on a mix of approaches:
- Talk therapy: One-on-one or group sessions with licensed or unlicensed counselors who attempt to identify supposed “root causes” of same-sex attraction, such as childhood trauma or disrupted parental bonding. Participants are coached to reinterpret their identity through frameworks that treat it as symptomatic of something else.
- Religious programming: Prayer sessions, fasting, scripture study, exorcism-like rituals, and confessional practices aimed at spiritual transformation. Many faith-based camps treat homosexuality as a sin that can be overcome through devotion and repentance.
- Behavioral modification: Rules around dress, posture, mannerisms, and social interactions designed to enforce gender conformity. Participants may be coached to adopt stereotypically masculine or feminine behaviors based on their assigned sex.
- Isolation and immersion: Residential camps often remove participants from their normal social environment, including supportive friends or LGBTQ+ communities, and immerse them in a controlled setting for days or weeks at a time.
The mix of religion and pseudo-clinical language gives these programs a veneer of legitimacy that can be deeply confusing for participants, especially young people who trust the adults directing them. The line between “spiritual guidance” and “psychological intervention” is deliberately blurred.
Who Gets Sent and How Common It Is
A systematic review of prevalence studies found that among sexual and gender minority populations, the median lifetime exposure to conversion practices was about 8.5%, though estimates ranged widely from 2% to well above that depending on the sample. Studies conducted in the United States showed higher median prevalence (around 13%) compared to Canadian samples (around 7%). Transgender individuals reported higher rates of exposure (median 12%) compared to cisgender sexual minorities (median 4%), and people assigned male at birth experienced conversion efforts at higher rates regardless of whether they were cisgender or transgender.4PubMed Central. A systematic review of the prevalence of lifetime experience with ‘conversion’ practices among sexual and gender minority populations Racial and ethnic minorities also appeared to face higher exposure, with Indigenous and other racial minority groups showing a median prevalence of about 8% compared to 5% among white groups.
Many people who undergo conversion efforts are minors. They are sent by parents, guardians, or religious communities, often before they have the legal standing to refuse. A cross-sectional study of 245 LGBT young adults found that parent-initiated conversion efforts during adolescence, whether through therapists, religious leaders, or direct parental pressure, were associated with depression, suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts, less educational attainment, and less weekly income in young adulthood.5PubMed Central. Parent-Initiated Sexual Orientation Change Efforts With LGBT Adolescents: Implications for Young Adult Mental Health and Adjustment The family dynamic is a crucial piece of the picture: a young person told by their own parents that their identity is broken, and then sent to professionals or clergy to be “fixed,” carries a specific kind of wound that goes beyond what happens in the camp itself.
The Mental Health Toll
The harm done by conversion efforts is not theoretical or anecdotal at this point. A growing body of research has documented the damage in increasingly specific terms.
For transgender adolescents, the consequences can be particularly severe. One study using data on transgender youth in the United States found that exposure to conversion therapy increased the likelihood of a suicide attempt by 17 percentage points, amounting to a 55% increase in suicide attempt risk. The same study found that conversion therapy substantially increased the likelihood that a transgender adolescent would run away from home.6PubMed. Conversion therapy, suicidality, and running away: An analysis of transgender youth in the U.S. Running away is not just a behavioral outcome; it is a marker of how unsafe the home environment has become.
Research on gender identity conversion efforts more broadly has found associations with negative mental health outcomes and substance use problems, and these harms persist regardless of how a person was doing mentally before the conversion attempt. That finding is important because it undercuts a common defense: the claim that conversion therapy survivors were already struggling, and that their poor outcomes reflect pre-existing conditions rather than the therapy itself. The data suggest otherwise.7PubMed Central. Understanding harms associated with gender identity conversion efforts among transgender and nonbinary individuals: The role of preexisting mental well-being
There is also evidence that conversion efforts can disrupt a person’s transition decisions in harmful ways. Transgender and nonbinary people exposed to gender identity conversion efforts showed patterns suggesting the experience interfered with their ability to make adaptive decisions about their own transition, adding a layer of confusion and delay to an already complex process.8PubMed Central. Adaptive transition decisions and identity exploration among transgender and nonbinary persons exposed to gender identity conversion efforts In other words, the damage is not only emotional. It can actively obstruct the path toward the identity-affirming care that is known to improve outcomes.
The Financial and Societal Cost
Beyond individual suffering, conversion practices impose measurable economic costs. A modeling study published in JAMA Pediatrics estimated that LGBTQ+ youths who received conversion efforts were expected to incur about $206,000 in discounted lifetime costs per person, compared to roughly $108,000 for those who received no therapy and about $68,000 for those who received affirmative therapy. The cost of administering conversion therapy itself was actually slightly lower than affirmative therapy, largely because conversion efforts are often delivered by unlicensed religious practitioners rather than licensed professionals. But the costs associated with adverse health outcomes, including suicide attempts, fatal suicide attempts, depression, and substance abuse, were roughly $140,000 higher with conversion efforts.9PubMed Central. Humanistic and Economic Burden of Conversion Therapy Among LGBTQ Youths in the United States
Scaled to the estimated half-million LGBTQ+ youths at risk of receiving conversion efforts in 2021, the total economic burden including health harms was estimated at $9.23 billion.9PubMed Central. Humanistic and Economic Burden of Conversion Therapy Among LGBTQ Youths in the United States Quality-adjusted life years were also worse: people who went through conversion efforts had fewer healthy life-years ahead of them compared to those who received affirmative care or even no therapy at all. Affirmative therapy, which supports a person’s self-identified orientation and gender, came out ahead on every measure.
Where Conversion Practices Are Banned and Where They Persist
The legal landscape is a patchwork. In the United States, a growing number of states and municipalities have banned licensed professionals from performing conversion therapy on minors, but coverage is far from universal, and bans typically do not reach religious counselors or unlicensed practitioners. This means that faith-based residential camps, which account for a large share of conversion activity, often operate in a legal gray zone even where bans exist.
Internationally, some countries have moved toward comprehensive bans. In the UK, about 2% of LGBT individuals have undergone conversion therapy and another 5% have been offered it, yet as of recent analysis the practice still was not banned nationally.10LSE Law Review. Conversion Therapy Bans and Legal Paternalism: Justifying State Intervention to Restrict a LGBT Individual’s Autonomy to Undergo Conversion Therapy A persistent argument against bans centers on individual autonomy: the claim that adults should be free to seek conversion if they choose. Legal scholars have pushed back on this, arguing that the decision to undergo conversion therapy is rarely truly voluntary, given the social and religious pressure involved, and that bans are justified on the same grounds as other paternalistic legal restrictions that protect people from consenting to serious self-harm.
Religious organizations in many countries enjoy exemptions from anti-discrimination laws when their actions conform to the doctrines of their faith, which creates additional legal shelter for conversion practices conducted under a religious banner.11PubMed Central. Sexual identity or religious freedom: could conversion therapy ever be morally permissible in limited urgent situations? The tension between religious liberty and protection from harm remains one of the central obstacles to comprehensive legislative action.
What Recovery Looks Like for Survivors
Surviving conversion therapy is not the end of the story. The aftereffects can persist for years or decades, and recovery is rarely a straightforward process. Research with survivors has identified several consistent themes in how people rebuild their lives after these experiences.
Qualitative studies of survivors describe three interconnected recovery pathways: rebuilding social support by connecting with LGBTQ+ and LGBTQ+-affirming communities; accessing affirming therapy and healthcare; and learning to manage ongoing contact or conflict with the people who initiated the conversion effort in the first place.12SSM – Qualitative Research in Health. Overcoming Conversion Therapy: A Qualitative Investigation of Experiences of Survivors That third pathway is often the most difficult. Many survivors maintain relationships with family members or religious communities who still hold the beliefs that led to the conversion attempt, and navigating those relationships without re-exposing themselves to harm requires ongoing boundary management.
Researchers in Brazil studying survivors of conversion practices have advocated for an integrative approach to recovery that encompasses psychological care, spiritual reconciliation for those who want it, and community-based support, all delivered through a trauma-informed lens that affirms sexual and gender diversity.13PubMed. Healing from the ‘Gay Cure’: The Legacy of Conversion Therapies and Recovery Strategies in Brazil The spiritual reconciliation piece is worth noting: many survivors were harmed in religious settings and may feel alienated from faith communities or from spirituality in general. Recovery for some involves finding faith communities that affirm them, while others step away from organized religion entirely. Both are valid paths.
Healthcare providers working with survivors face specific clinical considerations. Practitioners are advised to assess for PTSD, evaluate hopelessness alongside protective factors, and recognize that gender-specific trauma manifests differently across individuals. Recovery timelines for conversion therapy survivors are measured in years or decades, not weeks or months. Post-traumatic growth writing exercises have been suggested as a potentially useful therapeutic tool.14Mental Health and Social Inclusion. Beyond survival: applying positive autoethnography across three conversion therapy survivor accounts The emphasis on formulation-driven care, meaning treatment shaped around each person’s individual experience rather than a one-size-fits-all diagnostic label, reflects the reality that conversion therapy trauma does not look the same in everyone.
Why “It Didn’t Work for Me” Understates the Problem
A common misconception about conversion therapy is that the worst outcome is simply that it doesn’t work, that a person goes through the program, remains LGBTQ+, and moves on with their life. The research paints a much darker picture. The experience itself produces harm even in people who entered the program without pre-existing mental health difficulties.7PubMed Central. Understanding harms associated with gender identity conversion efforts among transgender and nonbinary individuals: The role of preexisting mental well-being The process of being told your identity is disordered, being immersed in an environment designed to extinguish it, and then experiencing the inevitable failure of that project creates lasting psychological injury that did not exist before.
There is also the rare person who reports that conversion therapy “worked” for them. Every major medical and mental health organization that has reviewed the evidence, including the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, and the World Health Organization, has concluded that sexual orientation and gender identity cannot be changed through these interventions, and that claims of success typically reflect suppression of behavior rather than genuine change in orientation. A person who stops acting on their attraction or delays their transition is not someone whose identity has changed; they are someone who has learned to hide. The costs of that hiding, in terms of mental health, authenticity, and quality of life, are well documented in the same literature that tracks the harms of conversion efforts themselves.
For anyone trying to understand what a conversion camp actually is: it is a place that takes a person’s identity, declares it a problem, and attempts to solve that problem using methods that range from the pseudo-clinical to the overtly coercive. Every credible scientific body that has examined the practice has reached the same conclusion. It does not accomplish what it claims, and it leaves real damage in its wake.