EDMONTON — Alberta continues to list homosexuality as a “mental disorder” along with bestiality and pedophilia, and doctors used the diagnostic code to bill the province for treating gays and lesbians more than 1,750 times between 1995 and 2004, government records show.

The province has known about the classification for more than a decade and the Conservative government first promised to change it in 1998. On Tuesday, Health Minister Gene Zwozdesky repeated that promise.

“It has no place in Alberta,” Zwozdesky said, adding he has called for a review of the entire 300-page diagnostic code. “It is simply an incorrect and unacceptable classification and I’ve ordered it to be removed immediately.”

The diagnostic code is used by doctors when they bill the province for services provided to Albertans.

The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1973, followed by the Canadian Psychiatric Association in 1982. Eight years later, in 1990, the World Health Organization removed homosexuality from the 10th version of the International Classification of Diseases, known as the ICD-10.

In 1998, then-Health Minister Halvar Jonson said the province was in the process of changing the codes.

“A new coding structure has been developed which Alberta Health is considering,” Jonson wrote in a letter to then-Liberal health critic Gary Dickson. “This new coding will address the concerns regarding the classification of the diagnostic code for homosexuality.”

Alberta’s current diagnostic codes were last updated in 2005, the same year that British Columbia removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders and four years after China did so.

In Alberta, homosexuality still falls under the heading of Mental Disorders: Sexual Deviations and Disorders. It is at the top of the list and is followed by bestiality, pedophilia, transvestism, exhibitionism, transsexualism, disorders of psychosexual identity, frigidity and impotence.

Neither Zwozdesky nor Alberta Health and Wellness spokesman Howard May could explain why Alberta’s diagnostic codes have not been revised.

“These are not Alberta’s codes, they were developed by the World Health Organization, under international guidelines, and are in use in many provinces,” May said.

Asked why Alberta’s current codes are based on the 1975 ICD-9 and not on the 1990 ICD-10 that drops homosexuality from the list of mental disorders, May said in an email: “The codes are extremely complex. It would be a vast undertaking to change them.”

Human rights activist Rob Wells has been fighting to have the code removed for more than a decade and launched a human rights complaint against the province on Dec. 15.

“People point to the diagnostic codes to justify their homophobic bigotry,” he said. “It is used by a lot of fundamentalists to justify their homophobia, to claim that homosexuals are diseased.

“It also reinforces the negative stereotypes that many health-care professionals still have.”

Using access to information laws, Wells obtained government data showing doctors billed the government using the diagnostic code for homosexuality 1,782 times between 1995 and 2004. The province could not provide more recent data on Tuesday.

Liberal MLA Laurie Blakeman first raised the issue in the legislature in 1999.

“It’s just so wrong, it’s sickening,” she said. “Here we are in 2010 and the Conservatives are still living in 1950 ... I still hear some of them talk about how this is a ‘lifestyle decision.’ ”

Dr. Andre Grace, director of the Institute for Sexual Minority Studies at the University of Alberta, said the code is an abrogation of the government’s responsibility.

“What we have seen over the years is a government in this province ... that have not changed their opinion of gay and lesbian people,” he said. “Something like this is just another indication that we are indeed second-class citizens in this province.”

Alberta Medical Association spokesman Ron Kustra said the association is involved in service codes that set doctors’ fees, not the diagnostic codes.

“The diagnostic codes are the responsibility of Alberta Health and Wellness,” he said. He could not say whether the AMA would take a position on the issue.

Alberta Psychiatric Association president Dr. Douglas Mann said the psychiatric community no longer considers homosexuality to be a mental disorder.

“Homosexuality has been deleted as an illness, per se, but I think there’s a big political component to that,” he said. “There are a broad group of conditions that have political overtones.”

He couldn’t explain why the codes haven’t been updated, either.

“That would be a political move,” he said. “It’s certainly not a medical issue.”

Edmonton Journal

kkleiss@edmontonjournal.com