Evaluation of aversion therapy

Success rates are an important way of evaluating the usefulness of a therapy.  Aversion therapy has been evaluated clinically e.g. Frawley and Smith, (1992) evaluated an aversion therapy programme over 4 chemical dependency units, it showed significant success in treating cocaine, marijuana and alcohol dependencies, e.g. they found that 81% of alcohol abusers abstained at  6 months following treatment, with 71.3% still abstinent at 20 months.

However, most researchers believe that a broad spectrum approach is best to reduce alcohol intake, this might include controlled drinking which would not be possible alongside aversion therapy because even a limited experience of alcohol without the unpleasant stimulus would extinguish the conditioned response to alcohol.

Aversion therapy has been used to successfully treat alcoholics, but generally only when it is used alongside other treatments. Some patients go for about a year without drinking alcohol again, but some do not transfer this learning to the home situation.   It needs to be part of a treatment rather than the only treatment, since it has the power to maintain or automate new behaviours, but not create them.

It can also be criticised for ethical reasons.  As a treatment for alcohol abuse it requires the patient to undergo de-tox first which is likely to result in unpleasant withdrawal symptoms.  However, for many, the alternative is worse as sustained alcohol abuse will seriously impair health.
It could be regarded as a form of social control to change behaviour that society finds undesirable.  For example it has been used to try and condition homosexual men ‘straight’.  This was done by pairing the presentation of slides of naked people with electric shocks which were activated when the patient became aroused by the slides of naked males so as this kind of stimuli becomes aversive to the person.  This type of therapy has not been used clinically since the 1970s as many criticise attempts to change a person’s sexual preference on ethical grounds.

The assumptions of aversion therapy have been incorporated into a more modern treatment called covert sensitisation. This involves the association of an image with the undesirable behaviour, so rather than making the patient actually sick, they just need to imagine being sick. This version of behaviour therapy is therefore more ethical.

A further application of classical conditioning is systematic desensitisation which has been found to be a very effective and simple way of removing phobias.