A man subjected to weeks of barbaric gay aversion therapy as a teen has shared how he still suffers traumatic flashbacks 50 years later.
John Sam Jones, now 66, was an 18-year-old biology student at Aberystwyth University when his suicidal thoughts and shame over his sexuality became unbearable.
He admitted himself to a psychiatric facility in Denbigh, Wales, hoping that gay "aversion therapy" would put a stop to his attraction to men, Wales Online reports.
Doctors promised to "cure" him with the treatment, which involved being rigged him up to a power source and jolted when his body responded to gay pornography.
Speaking from the Canary Islands, where he now lives with his partner Jupp, John told Wales Online: "The psychiatrist was the first person I told I was gay.
"And the response was, 'Oh we can cure that. We don't have to treat the depression, we will just cure the homosexuality and then you won't be depressed anymore.'"
John likened the "therapy" to Ivan Pavlov's famous dog experiment.
By repeatedly being given food while a bell rang, the dogs had been conditioned to salivate at the sound.
The thinking at the hospital was that John's sexual attraction to men would end if he was repeatedly put through pain while watching gay pornography.
"I was wired up to a wristband that was attached to an electricity source," he says.
"I was shown homosexual pornography and when my penis responded, I was given electric shocks to the wristband."
The procedure was administered by a doctor and two nurses. John was naked from the waist down as they monitored his response to the pornography. He felt like "some kind of laboratory rat".
John recalls being jolted about 15 to 20 times in each of the sessions, which lasted an hour to 90 minutes. He went through the excruciating therapy every day for about five weeks.
He adds: "It wasn't changing my sexual orientation. It was actually closing my sexuality down. And although I didn't know it at the time, for years I would have flashbacks to the electric shocks whenever I became sexually interested in anybody.
"Every few days I was asked whether I thought I might be more interested in women. And as a reward after the first few weeks of these electric shocks, I was shown pornography including women and not given an electric shock."
Hundreds of patients were staying in the hospital, which John remembers as a "huge Victorian palace" of an asylum.
The Grade II-listed site, which closed in 1995, is now being redeveloped for housing. John recalls it being run like a village, with patients put to work on its farm.
The patients did not talk to each other about their problems. Instead they discussed their occupational therapy, in which they made Basil Brush puppets from furry materials. "We were all very drugged up with tranquillisers and antidepressants," says John.
He recalls the language used by doctors at the hospital being "very schoolboy". One doctor suggested John could go home for a weekend and "find a woman to f***". This sparked an idea.
He adds: "I thought I could go away for the weekend, come back and say it had all worked and everything was fine. So that's what I did. They took me at my word and I was discharged.
"Within days of being discharged I seriously tried to take my own life, because I realised that the treatment hadn't worked. It felt like I was going to live life in the shadows. I wasn't prepared to live like that.
"That's when I told my family I was gay. And my mother's response was, 'Well, better a gay son than a dead son.' And my father's response was to say nothing."
John says neither of those reactions had much impact on how he felt. "I was still living with my own self-hatred," he adds. "You reach a point where you hate yourself so much, there's nothing anybody can do to bring you back from that."
He returned to the hospital for another month, this time with no aversion therapy. John recalls being "left very quietly under lots of drugs".
"What I remember about that time is the goo at the side of my mouth that was created by the drugs I was taking," he adds. "It seemed to thicken the saliva.
"I remember having long sessions with a psychologist who seemed very preoccupied with trying to discover whether any adults had sexually interfered with me.
"And I have never, ever had that experience. Much of the common mythology about what made people gay in those days was that you were groomed."
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