Posted on 07/16/2004 8:54:50 AM PDT by Laissez-faire capitalist
In 1973, The American Psychiatric Association (APA) removed homosexuality as a mental disorder from the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II).
This decision was a significant victory for homosexual activists and they have continued to claim that the APA based their decision on new scientific discoveries that proved that homosexual behavior is normal and should be affirmed in our culture.
This is false and part of numerous homosexual urban legends that have infiltrated every aspect of our culture. The removal of homosexuality as a mental disorder has given homosexual activists credibility in the culture, and they have demanded that their sexual behavior be affirmed in society.
What Really Happened?
Numerous psychiatrists over the past decades have described what forces were really at work both inside and outside of the American Psychiatric Association---and what led to the removal of homosexuality as a mental disorder.
Dr. Ronald Bayer, a pro-homosexual psychiatrist has described what actually occured in his book, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnoses. (1981)
In Chapter 4, "Diagnostic Politics: Homosexuality and the American Psychiatric Association," Dr. Bayer says that the first attack by homosexual activists against the APA began in 1970 when this organization held its convention in San Francisco. Homosexual activists decided to disrupt the conference by interrupting speakers and shouting down and ridiculing psychiatrists who viewed homosexuality as a mental disorder. In 1971, homosexual activist Frank Kameny worked with the Gay Liberation Front collective to demonstrate against the APA's convention. At the 1971 conference, Kamney grabbed the microphone and yelled, "Psychiatry is the enemy incarnate. Psychiatry has waged a relentless war of extermination against us. You may take this as a decleration of war against you."
Homosexuals forged APA credentials and gained access to exhibit areas in the conference. They threatened anyone who claimed that homosexuals needed to be cured.
Kamney had found an ally inside of the APA named Kent Robinson who helped the homosexual activist present his demand that homosexualiy be removed from the DSM. At the 1972 convntion, homosexual activists were permitted to set up a display booth, entitled "Gay, Proud, and Healthy."
Kameny was then permitted to be part of a panel of psychiatrists who were to discuss homosexuality. The effort to remove homosexuality as a mental disorder from the DSM was the result of power politics, threats, and intimidation, not scientific discoveries.
Prior to the APA's 1973 convention, several psychiatrists attempted to organize opposition to the efforts of homosexuals to remove homosexual behavior from the DSM. Organizing this effort were Drs. Irving Bieber and Charles Socarides who formed the Ad Hoc Committee Against the Deletion of Homosexuality from the Dsm-II.
The DSM-II listed homosexuality as an abnormal behavior under section "302. Sexual Deviations." It was the first deviation listed.
After much political pressure, a committee of the APA met behind closed doors in 1973 and voted to remove homosexuality as a mental disorder from the DSM-II. Opponents were given 15 minutes to protest this change, according to Dr. Jeffery Satinover, in Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth. Satinover writes that after this vote was taken, the decision was to be voted on by the entire APA membership. The National Gay Task Force purchased the APA's mailing list and sent out a letter to the APA members urging them to vote to remove homosexuality as a disorder. No APA member was informed that the mailing had been funded by this homosexual activist group.
According to Satinover, "How much the 1973 APA decision was motivated by politics is only becoming clear even now. While attending a conference in England in 1994, I met a man who told me an account that he had told no one else. He had been in the gay life for for years but had left the lifestyle. He recounted how that after the 1973 APA decisiion, he and his lover, along with a certain very highly placed officer of the APA Board of Trustees and his lover, all sat around the officer's apartment celebrating their victory. For among the gay activists placed high in the APA who maneuvered to ensure a victory was this man--suborning from the top what was presented to both the membership and the public as a disinterested search for truth."
Dr. Socarides Speaks Out
Dr. Charles Socarides has set the record straight on how homosexuals inside and outside of the APA forced this organization to remove homosexuality as a mental disorder. This was done without any valid scientific evidence to prove that homosexuiality is not a disordered behavior.
Dr. Socarides, writing in Sexual Politics and Scientific Logic : The Issue of Homosexuality writes: "To declare a condition a 'non-condition,' a group of practitioners had removed it from our list of serious psychosexual disorders. The action was all the more remarkable when one considers that it involved an out-of-hand and peremptory disregard and dismissal not only of hundreds of psychiatric and psychoanalytic research papers and reports, but also a number of other serious studies by groups of psychiatrists, psychologists, and educators over the past seventy years..."
Socarides continued: "For the next 18 years, the APA decision served as a Trojan horse, opening the gates to widespread psychological and social change in sexual customs and mores. The decision was to be used on numerous occasions for numerous purposes with the goal of normalizing homosexuality and elevating it to an esteemed status."
"To some American psychiatrists, this action remains a chilling reminder that if scientific principles are not fought for, they can be lost--a disillusioning warning that unless we make no exceptions to science, we are subject to the snares of political factionalism and the propogation of untruths to an unsuspecting and uninformed public, to the rest of the medical profession, and to the behavioral sciences." Dr. Socarides' report is available from the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality: www.narth.com.
The Importance of The DSM.
The DSM(Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is the most widely used disgnostic reference book utilized by mental health professionals in the United States.
It's a manual by which all diagnostic codes are derived for diagnosis and treatment - every single physician (an estimated 850,000*) in the United States refers to this book in order to code for a diagnoses. In plain English, what does this mean? It means that for over 30 years physicians have been prevented from properly diagnosing homosexuality as an aberrant behavior and thus, cannot, recomend a treatment for these individuals.
Prior to that time, homosexuality had been treated as a mental disorder under section "302. Sexual Deviations" in the DSM-II. Section 302 said, in part: "This category is for individuals whose sexual interests are directed primarily towards objects other than people of the opposite sex, toward sexual acts...performed under bizarre circumstances...Even though many find their practices distasteful, they remain unable to substitue normal sexual behavior for them." Homosexuality was listed as the first sexual deviation under 302. Once that diagnostic code for homosexuality was removed, physicians, including psychiatrists, have been prevented from diagnosing homosexuality as a mental disorder for more than three decades.
*American Medical Association statistic, 2002.
The problem is that "treatment' for homosexuality has proven to be quackery.
The Founders gave us the tools to deal with this: It's called "freedom of association." We will never eliminate homosexuals, and it is probably counterproductive to try. But we don't have to let them in to every aspect of society, especially those invovling young boys, either.
I was listening to a re-run of Law and Order on TNT. The defendant's lawyer was trying to get a racist murderer off on the novel grounds that racism is a mental illness, and the defendant should get treatment, not jail time and execution. This lawyer was examining the prosecution's psychiatrist, who denied that racism was a mental illness. The dialogue went something like this:
Lawyer: "Why won't psychiatrists reclassify racism as a mental illness?"
Psychiatrist: "Because there is no scientific evidence indicating that we should do so."
Lawyer: "But there was no scientific evidence indicating that homosexuality wasn't a mental illness, yet you reclassified that! Why?"
Psychiatrist: "True; that was a reaction to a changing social environment and consensus."
I thought that was a interesting exchange to go out from a mass-media popular program.
Psychiatry hasn't helped society in this issue at all, and I for one doubt that the practice ever could.
In 1973, The American Psychiatric Association (APA) removed homosexuality as a mental disorder from the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II).
durring the same time frame, they also put PMS as a mental disorder, allowing women to kill their husbands and plead insanity, getting away with lighter sentencing.
it was just another attempt by the liberals to express hatred of all things straight, male, and white.
Baloney.
Before 1973, when homosexuality was removed from the DSM as a mental disorder, there were numerous scientific papers/studies that were present within the sexual behavior medline that showed the effectiveness of sexual reorientation treatment. Sure, the percentage of homosexuals who were treated that changed their sexual orientation from total homosexual to total heterosexual was between 30 and 50%, but should treatment be denied, say, for all people who may suufer a heart attck, if the success rate of treatment is only 30 to 50%?
As well, recently, there was a paper published among the American Psychological Associations books by Dr. Throckmorten that showed that reorientation treatment was safe and effective. Dr. Spitzer's(The man who in 1973 helped lead the charge to have homosexuality removed from the DSM-II) recent work(2003) also shows that sexual reorientation treatment does, in fact, work.
Both show that sexual reorientation treatment for homosexuals is successful, just as it was proven to be before 1973.
whats sad though, is that i can witness even my homo/bisexual friends having mental instability. i have pointed out that their is a correlation, and they deny it.
i am yet to meet a homo/bisexual who either wasnt suicidal, or raped, or just has problems at home.
i will admit to having had thoughts like that before (homosexual) and you know what? on reflection, it was also in some of the darker parts of my life. times when i felt like crawling into a ball and enjoying nothingness forever.
its sad really... a full 5-10% of our people, told by the tv daily, that their painful thoughts are normal, and that they should just live with them.
Very interesting exchange....I am surprised that TNT broadcast that. Thanks for the post.
There was a recent Dutch study conducted within the Netherlands, the most gay-affirming society on the planet, and has been for decades, that showed that homosexuals are far more likely to be alcoholics, to suffer single or even multiple mental disorders and on and on...This agrees with other studies within highly gay-affirming socities like San Francisco, New Zealand, etc.. and they all show the same thing.
Blows out of the water that " internalized homophobia" is responsible for homosexuals higher mental problem rates.
There are also studies that show a high correlation of homosexuality with being raped/molested as a child by an adult man. Just Google, you'll find these studies.
If true, concerning PMS being declared a mental disorder, that does not surprise me in the least.
I read an interesting article by a psychiatrist who believed that homosexuality was a symptom of other mental disorders. He found that when he treated the other problems of his homosexual patients, their "same sex attraction" went away, too!
This is insane. Yes, there are a good number of homosexuals who face mental illness in their lives. But it ain't just the queers lining up at the pharmacy counters for psychiatric medications. There's an awful lot of straight folx out there on Prozac, you know. And, don't argue percentages with me unless you've got published statistics to back them up.
And, to compare homosexual desire to nihilism is patently absurd. I suppose we're still to believe masturbation to be self-abuse, right?
Hmmm. My palm is getting a bit hairy . . . urban legend, my ass!
correcting myself. PMS was reclassified in the mid 90's. before i took interest in Psychology (as i was only 8 at the time)
however, that does not change the weight or direction of the heavy foot.
there were numerous scientific papers/studies that were present within the sexual behavior medline that showed the effectiveness of sexual reorientation treatment.
I believe that more effort should be afforded to reorientation treatment. Isn't a form of this used to rehabilitate victims of child prostitution?
i never said all people with problems are gay. i simply said in my experience (and if you looked, youd find it too, i assure you) and research, gay people have issues.
and these issues are not "because thy are gay"
just the opposite.
i view masterbation as a recreational experience, thank you very much :p
that sounds about right.
Thanks. You say "google." Where did you start?
Urges. People have them all the time. For the most pert they are resisted. Occasionaly, by some, they are satisified. Like David Berkowitz, or John Wayne Gacie, among others.
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