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A 'deliberate egregious breach of trust'

Conversion therapy was formally banned in Ontario in 2015, but it has been inconsistent with the medical standard for much longer.

“It is important to note at the outset that this case is not about the standard of practice of the profession,” the college’s discipline panel wrote in its decision. Iscove’s career-long use of outdated and discredited quasi-Freudian theories about gayness as “psychic masochism” may be “controversial,” as they put it, but it was not the focus of the college’s inquiry.

Efficiency partly explains why not. A case based on psychoanalytical theory would have been complicated, requiring experts on all sides. The simple conviction for sexual abuse is enough to end Iscove’s career, regardless of why he did it, or what therapeutic idea he might have been pursuing when he told one patient in his office, “You may touch me if you like.”

The case was based on uncorroborated testimony of the victims, who both came forward reluctantly several years after the abuse, after disclosing it to other psychiatrists, and in one case after learning there was another victim. The panel believed them, found Iscove evasive, and doubted the credibility of his categorical denials. Had they decided otherwise, however, and found the sexual abuse unproven, then Iscove’s decades of treating homosexuality as a neurotic disease would have gone unsanctioned.

He was never charged criminally.

The public disgrace of Melvyn Iscove is also a case study in how arcane medical theories can linger in quiet corners of the profession long after they have been widely discredited, even after they have been legally banned.