Should the NHS/government issue an apology/compensation to LGBT people who were given electric shock therapy?

[Whatexcellentboiledpotatoes]

I've just watched a short documentary on this.

Hundreds of people in the UK, still very much alive today, received electric shock therapy on the NHS for being gay. Many were children or teenagers and many were coerced into it.

Now we know better, should these people not receive an apology from the NHS and/or the government?

Should they receive compensation?

I think an apology should be issued at the very least. In fact, I was surprised to learn one hasn't been.

No what is it with people wanting others
to apologise for the things someone else did it means nothing coming from someone who didn’t work for the NHS at that time.

But plenty of the people who carried out the therapies ARE still around and not even that old.

We cannot afford to give compensation for everything that was legally done in different times.
We are on our knees as it is.

But it was a well known treatment option at that time and now people know better but they thought they were helping people back then. Times change medicine moves on we find new ways of dealing with things and people don’t always get it right but stop expecting people to apologise for doing their jobs.

No, you do your best with the information you have at the time. So unless there was evidence to suggest this therapy was harmful and going ahead went against a duty of care, it’s one of those - we know better now thankfully - situations.

Surely even in the 60s and 70s we knew better than to coerce people and treat children without the consent of their parents?

Not really, there was a strong doctor-knows-best culture in that period, and homosexuality was still being treated as a psychiatric disorder, often in institutions where there was little ethical oversight. The past was a very different place.

You could make those "past was a different place" and "culture" excuses about Jimmy Saville too though.

What Savile did was always illegal.

Its interesting that you characterise my comments as excuses, rather than recognising them as the observations that they are. Understanding why and how something happened in the context of its time has value, it allows us to ensure that the same circumstances aren't repeated hopefully preventing the issues happening again. Trying to apportion blame this long after the fact, and demanding apologies from people who weren't there has far less value imo.

Why would an apology from the current nhs/ government (who weren't even there in the 1960's/ 70's) hold any value?

If they really gave a damn about “past mistakes” of horrors performed on gay people, you’d think they would be more concerned about medicalising “feelings” with irreversible life altering medical procedures & plastic surgeries. But it’s all the rage today despite there being zero reputable medical evidence supporting puberty blockers, surgeries & hormone treatments.

so they could apologise but we’d all be better served if they learnt from past mistakes & took caution not to repeat history.

Homosexual acts were only decriminalised in the England/ Wales in 1967 and not till the 80s in Scotland and N Ireland.
It’s a horrible thing and we should be happy that things have moved on (not everywhere globally by the way!)
I don’t agree with the idea that people should be blamed or should pay for things that happened in the past in a time with different values and beliefs. Where / how should these things be funded? Who should apologise? How far back should we go? I agree that many things were terrible but we should be grateful that things have changed. And use any energy you have now to make changes to the many things that still need sorting out. That’s progress.

While we are at it women and children have been oppressed for years. Women had to die to get the vote. Children were put in workhouses. Children were bullied by teachers, cained, hit. Do they get an apology? Compensation?

Gay children are being told they are really the opposite sex, sterilised and mutilated today and their parents coerced with false threats that their children will commit suicide. Perhaps we should focus on stopping that before worrying about the fact that treatments considered best care on the past have since been found not to be.

Yeah I should have known better as a gay person than to have clicked on this thread.

So it was gay people not trans people? I was confused by your LGBT title.

Should I get compensation for the devastation caused to my life (still has major repercussions) by wildly inappropriate mental health treatment and judgement - oh, and criminalisation - because the NHS failed to recognise my autism and trauma? It's a lot more recent than what you're talking about...

But what he did wasn’t acceptable at the time (obviously!) and he knew it.

If a Dr carried this out in 1960, when they were maybe 30 (drs dont qualify until nid 20's) , they would now be 96/potentially not even alive. The managers who authorised it would have likely been older, and now over 100. So I think sueing them would be quite challenging. Or do you mean sue the organisation and take money from current patient care?