Alberta Continues To List Homosexuality As A Mental Disorder

Alberta continues to list homosexuality as a “mental disorder” alongside bestiality and pedophilia, and physicians in the Canadian province used the diagnostic code to bill the province for treating gays and lesbians more than 1,750 times between the years 1995 and 2004, government records show. The Edmonton Journal reports that the province has known about the classification for over a decade and that the Conservative government pledged to change it in 1998. Tuesday, Conservative Health Minister Gene Zwozdesky again promised to remove the classification, saying “It has no place in Alberta,” adding that he has called for an immediate review of the entire 300-page diagnostic code, saying “It is simply an incorrect and unacceptable classification and I’ve ordered it to be removed immediately.” In 1998, then health-minster Halvard Jonson wrote a letter to the then Liberal health critic Gary Dickson, promising the codes would be changed, saying “A new coding structure has been developed which Alberta Health is considering. This new coding will address the concerns regarding the classifications of the diagnostic code for homosexuality.” Alberta’s current diagnostic codes were last update in 2005, the same year that British Columbia removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. Four years later, China did the same. However, in Alberta, homosexuality still sits under the heading of Mental Disorders, Sexual Deviations and Disorders, where it tops the list, followed by bestiality, pedophilia, and transvestism. Neither Zwozdesky nor Alberta Health and Wellness spokesperson Howard May could explain why the province’s diagnostic codes could have not been revised, May, offering something akin to defence, saying “These are not Alberta’s codes, they were developed by the World Health Organization, under international guidelines, and are in use in many provinces.” When asked why Alberta’s current codes are based on the 1975 ICD-9 and not on the 1990 ICD-10 that deletes homosexuality from the list of mental disorders, May answered “The codes are extremely complex. It would be a vast undertaking to change them.” Human rights activist Rob Wells, who has been fighting to have the code removed for more than ten years, and who filed a human rights complaint against the province on December 15th, said “People point to the diagnostic codes to justify their homophobic bigotry. It is used by a lot of fundamentalists to justify their homophobia, to claim homosexuals are diseased.”