‘I still have flashbacks’: the ‘global epidemic’ of LGBT conversion therapy.

‘My depression was serious. I gained 60lbs. I felt suicidal’ ... conversion survivor Mathew Shurka in New York City’s West Village last month. Photograph: Tadej Znidarcic/Guardian

It sounds like a historical horror, but ‘treatment’ for sexual orientation remains legal in most of the world, including the UK.

Mathew Shurka was 16 when he sat down with his father and told him he was gay. Brought up in a conservative New York suburb, the youngest child in a secular Jewish family and the only son, he was “terrified”. But…