A new toolkit from Outright International and the Psychological Society of South Africa gives mental health providers across Africa evidence-based, trauma-informed guidance for supporting survivors of conversion practices. Free and available as an interactive e-learning module, it addresses the profound harm these practices cause and equips practitioners to support healing, identity, and resilience.

What has actually been launched?

Outright International, working with the Sexuality and Gender Division of the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA), has published the Toolkit for Mental Health Providers Working with Survivors of Conversion Practices in Africa. It runs to more than 400 pages, is grounded in African cultural, historical, and social realities, and covers 16 practical areas of care: creating safe therapeutic environments, rebuilding trust, addressing trauma responses, affirming identity, supporting spiritual and cultural reconciliation, managing family relationships, and helping survivors navigate misinformation and online spaces. A free, interactive e-learning module, developed with Studio Zafari, accompanies it.

I read that and felt something settle. Not relief exactly, but recognition. Someone has done the work. Someone has looked at the landscape for LGBTQ+ people across Africa, understood what conversion practices actually do to a person, and built something practical for the people trying to help.

Conversion therapy does not fail to work. It succeeds at causing harm.

That distinction matters, and the framing of conversion practices as ineffective therapy misses what they actually are. Thiruna Naidoo, Outright International's Project Officer for the African Regional Programme, put it plainly at the launch webinar: "Conversion practices are not a form of therapy or healthcare. They are harmful practices aimed at changing a person's sexual orientation or gender identity and expression."

Clinical psychologist Jenna-Lee de Beer-Procter described what survivors carry afterwards: a deep erosion of trust, in themselves, in their relationships, and in healthcare professionals. The internalised message that there is something wrong with them, that they are abnormal, sinful, or dangerous. That is not a failure to produce the intended outcome, it is the outcome conversion practices reliably produce. The toolkit is built for the people who survive it and must find a way back to themselves.

Why Africa, and why now?

The toolkit emerges from Outright International's research into conversion practices across Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, and builds on the 2023 Johannesburg Declaration Against SOGIE Change Efforts and Conversion Practices. Anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric and policies continue to gain ground across much of the continent, and affirming mental healthcare is not widely available. The resource responds to that gap directly. It is not a campaign document or an advocacy statement: it is a practical tool for practitioners who are already doing the work, or who want to start.

Saskia Messow of Studio Zafari made a point I appreciated about the e-learning module: it is not a replacement for the toolkit, but a way in. Experienced practitioners can go straight to the sections they need. Those new to this work can move through it from the beginning. The design removes the financial barrier entirely: the course is free.

Affirming care is not the same as being nice

Psychologist and LGBTQIA+ scholar-activist Suntosh Pillay said something at the launch that I think deserves to travel beyond the webinar. "An affirmative stance is much more than just being nice. It's about having a deep social, historical and political awareness about the kinds of people you're working with." He named heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and minority stress as concepts practitioners need to understand, not as abstract theory but as the lived architecture of discrimination that shapes what LGBTQ+ people bring into a therapeutic room.

He also challenged the assumption that this is niche work. Many practitioners, he said, are probably already working with survivors of conversion practices without knowing it, because they are not asking the right questions. That is a significant point. The toolkit is not only for specialists. It is for any practitioner who wants to be genuinely useful to the people who walk through their door.

What recovery actually requires

De Beer-Procter described the healing process as reconnecting survivors with themselves, their identities, and supportive communities. The toolkit does not prescribe a single rigid model for doing that: each of its 16 guidelines is designed to function independently, so practitioners can start where the survivor is, not where a protocol says they should be. That flexibility is not a gap in the resource; it is one of its strengths. People are not uniform in what they need, and trauma-informed care that respects that is more likely to actually help.

What strikes me most, reading about this project, is how much it centres the survivor rather than the argument. There are plenty of resources documenting the harms of conversion practices, and that documentation matters. But this toolkit asks the next question: given that harm has been done, what does good support look like? The answer, built across 400 pages and an interactive course, is that it looks like trust rebuilt, identity reclaimed, and shame gently dismantled by someone who knows what they are doing and why it matters.

That is the kind of practical solidarity that changes lives. I hope it reaches every practitioner across the continent who needs it.