'Gay Reparative Therapy’ I Owe The Gay Community An Apology: Dr. R.Spitzer
Dr. Robert Spitzer who now turns 80 who is a well known Researcher in the field of modern psychiatry published a poorly conceived 2003 investigation of so-called reparative therapy to “cure” homosexuality. The idea to study reparative therapy was pure Spitzer. Those who know him, describe this reparative idea as an effort to stick a finger in the eye of orthodox thinking of the time.
Four years after ‘Stonewall’ the gay community started pushing for scientific proof that this was not a disease. You are always going to have confused homosexuals that somehow feel uncomfortable with the idea of being different. Humans always have a tendency to assimilate one another. But most gays know who they are. They can even recall as children their first sexual thoughts or attraction and will identify it with the same sex. "We know who we are.” The problem is convincing people with old prejudices that their conceived ideas have no proof and make no sense when you are fair on the issue.
APA changed and with it the gay community had a great victory to have the American Psychiatric Association say that we were ok. One thing is to say you feel good. Another is for your doctor to examine you and say you are healthy.
Coming back to homosexuals that are confused, back then they had big voices, mainly through the mouths of religion and some psycho therapists that insisted in applying therapy(bleach on red hair I call it) for a change. It was for religious institutions benefit to say that despite that most gays said they did not want to change and they could not change and that they were ok, there were gays that were crying out for a cure. Imagine thse religious institutions and psycho therapists would make a bundle trying to repair something that was not broken. It would take for ever. If you are born with red hair you can bleach it and change the color; But surely those red roots will pop out again in good time.
Dr. Spitzer now part of the APA, as part of the establishment started listening to those voices. He started working with a group of religious ex gays that called themselves “Exodus International” based in Florida and Narth. These groups were performing “Reparative Therapy." From that group he recruited 200 men and women. He interviewed each in depth over the phone, asking about their sexual urges, feelings and behaviors before and after having the therapy, rating the answers on a scale.
One cited the Nuremberg Code of ethics to denounce the study as not only flawed but morally wrong. “We fear the repercussions of this study, including an increase in suffering, prejudice, and discrimination,” concluded a group of 15 researchers at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where Dr. Spitzer was affiliated.
The simple fact was that he had done something wrong, and at the end of a long and revolutionary career it didn’t matter how often he’d been right, how powerful he once was, or what it would mean for his legacy.
Following is the letter, which I believe should be given equal coverage in the that the media and particularly this paper Im quoting . The New York Times. But such a thing has not happened to this day.
But this paper puts it in a footnote not compared to the coverage of gays being change to straights. I think when you read the letter you will understand and hopefully fight those that talk about reparative therapy. You will know where it came from and what a mistake it was and the author which was swayed by a group of confused people and religious fanatics. They are experts at converting people. I know I grew up with them and studied with them.
A draft of the letter (Read below)
Dr. Robert Spitzer Apologizes to Gay Community for Infamous ‘Ex-Gay’ Study
Posted April 25th, 2012 by John M. Becker
Today, in a letter to Dr. Ken Zucker obtained exclusively by Truth Wins Out, Dr. Robert Spitzer made an unprecedented apology to the gay community — and victims of reparative therapy in particular — for his infamous, now-repudiated 2001 study that claimed some “highly motivated” homosexuals could go from gay to straight:
Several months ago I told you that because of my revised view of my 2001 study of reparative therapy changing sexual orientation, I was considering writing something that would acknowledge that I now judged the major critiques of the study as largely correct. After discussing my revised view of the study with Gabriel Arana, a reporter for American Prospect, and with Malcolm Ritter, an Associated Press science writer, I decided that I had to make public my current thinking about the study. Here it is.
Basic Research Question. From the beginning it was: “can some version of reparative therapy enable individuals to change their sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual?” Realizing that the study design made it impossible to answer this question, I suggested that the study could be viewed as answering the question, “how do individuals undergoing reparative therapy describe changes in sexual orientation?” – a not very interesting question.
The Fatal Flaw in the Study – There was no way to judge the credibility of subject reports of change in sexual orientation. I offered several (unconvincing) reasons why it was reasonable to assume that the subject’s reports of change were credible and not self-deception or outright lying. But the simple fact is that there was no way to determine if the subject’s accounts of change were valid.
I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy. I also apologize to any gay person who wasted time and energy undergoing some form of reparative therapy because they believed that I had proven that reparative therapy works with some “highly motivated” individuals.
Robert Spitzer. M.D.
Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry,
Columbia University
In the late 1990s as today, the psychiatric establishment considered the therapy as a failed attempt to explain something and going nowhere. Very few therapists thought of homosexuality as a disorder. Now comes Spitzer and decided to go against the thinking of the times which had progressed with different studies and found homosexuality to not be a disease of any type; But in 1980 the American Psychiatric Association stuck with the disturbing classification, saying that it was a disturbance. Dr. Spitzer was against that classification and eventually had the association declassified their opinion that homosexuality was a disease. He went against the norm. Eventually the Association went along with him. Now he became part of the establishment by having brought them to this new view.
APA changed and with it the gay community had a great victory to have the American Psychiatric Association say that we were ok. One thing is to say you feel good. Another is for your doctor to examine you and say you are healthy.
Coming back to homosexuals that are confused, back then they had big voices, mainly through the mouths of religion and some psycho therapists that insisted in applying therapy(bleach on red hair I call it) for a change. It was for religious institutions benefit to say that despite that most gays said they did not want to change and they could not change and that they were ok, there were gays that were crying out for a cure. Imagine thse religious institutions and psycho therapists would make a bundle trying to repair something that was not broken. It would take for ever. If you are born with red hair you can bleach it and change the color; But surely those red roots will pop out again in good time.
Dr. Spitzer now part of the APA, as part of the establishment started listening to those voices. He started working with a group of religious ex gays that called themselves “Exodus International” based in Florida and Narth. These groups were performing “Reparative Therapy." From that group he recruited 200 men and women. He interviewed each in depth over the phone, asking about their sexual urges, feelings and behaviors before and after having the therapy, rating the answers on a scale.
He then compared the scores on this questionnaire, before and after therapy. “The majority of participants gave reports of change from a predominantly or exclusively homosexual orientation before therapy to a predominantly or exclusively heterosexual orientation in the past year.”
He decided to published a study in favor of that therapy. What went wrong? Wasn’t he on our side? Was it not He that convinced the APA that homosexuality was not a disturbance?
To That I quote someone by the name of Gumbs; “ Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you going to get."
The New York Times wrote: The study — presented at a psychiatry meeting in 2001, before publication — immediately created a sensation, and ex-gay groups seized on it as solid evidence for their case. This was Dr. Spitzer, after all, the man who single-handedly removed homosexuality from the manual of mental disorders. No one could accuse him of bias.
But gay leaders accused him of betrayal, and they had their reasons.
The study had serious problems. It was based on what people remembered feeling years before — an often fuzzy record. It included some ex-gay advocates, who were politically active. And it didn’t test any particular therapy; only half of the participants engaged with a therapist at all, while the others worked with pastoral counselors, or in independent Bible study.
Several colleagues tried to stop the study in its tracks, and urged him not to publish it, Dr. Spitzer said.
Yet, heavily invested after all the work, he turned to a friend and former collaborator, Dr. Kenneth J. Zucker, psychologist in chief at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto and editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior, another influential journal.
“I knew Bob and the quality of his work, and I agreed to publish it,” Dr. Zucker said in an interview last week. The paper did not go through the usual peer-review process, in which unnamed experts critique a manuscript before publication. “But I told him I would do it only if I also published commentaries” of response from other scientists to accompany the study, Dr. Zucker said.
Those commentaries, with a few exceptions, were merciless on his conclusion.
Dr. Spitzer in no way implied in the study that being gay was a choice, or that it was possible for anyone who wanted to change to do so in therapy. But that didn’t stop socially conservative groups from citing the paper in support of just those points, according to Wayne Besen, executive director of Truth Wins Out, a nonprofit that fights antigay bias.
On one occasion, a politician in Finland held up the study in Parliament to argue against civil unions, according to Dr. Drescher.
“It needs to be said that when this study was misused for political purposes to say that gays should be cured — as it was, many times — Bob responded immediately, to correct misperceptions,” said Dr. Drescher, who is gay.
But Dr. Spitzer couldn’t control how his study was interpreted by everyone, and he could not erase the biggest scientific flaw of them all, roundly attacked in many of the commentaries: Simply asking people whether they’ve changed is no evidence at all of real change. People lie, to themselves and others. They continually change their stories, to suit their needs and moods.
By almost any measure, in short, the study failed the test of scientific rigor that Dr. Spitzer himself was so instrumental in enforcing for so many years.
“As I read these commentaries, I knew this was a problem, a big problem, and one I couldn’t answer,” Dr. Spitzer said. “How do you know someone has really changed?”
adamfoxie*{ Now you know where the idea of reparative therapy comes from and how somebody who’d helped to change the view of the psychiatric community and the world that gays were not sick or defective people mentally; Now he had done the worse of wrongs. If you believe gays are not defective, why would you want to change them? to what? Repaired homosexuals?
What happens when you try to fix something that is not broken? You break it, is the answer.
What does a broken person does? Many commit suicide, we still see it all the time. These report has done so much damaged and brought misery for people that were already dealing with the burden of coming out and convincing their friends and families that they were ok.
Now that he realized what he is done, this is what he says ( NyTimes):
The simple fact was that he had done something wrong, and at the end of a long and revolutionary career it didn’t matter how often he’d been right, how powerful he once was, or what it would mean for his legacy.
Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, considered by some to be the father of modern psychiatry, laid knowing he had to do the one thing that comes least naturally to him.
He pushed himself up and staggered into the dark. His desk seemed impossibly far away; Dr. Spitzer suffers from Parkinson’s disease and has trouble walking, sitting, even holding his head upright.
The word he uses to describe these limitations — pathetic — is the same one that for decades he wielded like an ax to strike down dumb ideas, empty theorizing, and junk studies.
Now here he was at his computer, ready to recant a study he had done himself, a poorly conceived 2003 investigation of so-called reparative therapy to “cure” homosexuality.
What to say? The issue of gay marriage was rocking national politics yet again. The California State Legislature was debating a bill to ban outright the therapy that his study supported, as being dangerous. A magazine writer who had been through the therapy as a teenager recently visited his house, to explain how miserably disorienting the experience was.
“I believe,” it concludes, “I owe the gay community an apology.”
Following is the letter, which I believe should be given equal coverage in the that the media and particularly this paper Im quoting . The New York Times. But such a thing has not happened to this day.
But this paper puts it in a footnote not compared to the coverage of gays being change to straights. I think when you read the letter you will understand and hopefully fight those that talk about reparative therapy. You will know where it came from and what a mistake it was and the author which was swayed by a group of confused people and religious fanatics. They are experts at converting people. I know I grew up with them and studied with them.
A draft of the letter (Read below)
Dr. Robert Spitzer Apologizes to Gay Community for Infamous ‘Ex-Gay’ Study
Posted April 25th, 2012 by John M. Becker
Today, in a letter to Dr. Ken Zucker obtained exclusively by Truth Wins Out, Dr. Robert Spitzer made an unprecedented apology to the gay community — and victims of reparative therapy in particular — for his infamous, now-repudiated 2001 study that claimed some “highly motivated” homosexuals could go from gay to straight:
Several months ago I told you that because of my revised view of my 2001 study of reparative therapy changing sexual orientation, I was considering writing something that would acknowledge that I now judged the major critiques of the study as largely correct. After discussing my revised view of the study with Gabriel Arana, a reporter for American Prospect, and with Malcolm Ritter, an Associated Press science writer, I decided that I had to make public my current thinking about the study. Here it is.
Basic Research Question. From the beginning it was: “can some version of reparative therapy enable individuals to change their sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual?” Realizing that the study design made it impossible to answer this question, I suggested that the study could be viewed as answering the question, “how do individuals undergoing reparative therapy describe changes in sexual orientation?” – a not very interesting question.
The Fatal Flaw in the Study – There was no way to judge the credibility of subject reports of change in sexual orientation. I offered several (unconvincing) reasons why it was reasonable to assume that the subject’s reports of change were credible and not self-deception or outright lying. But the simple fact is that there was no way to determine if the subject’s accounts of change were valid.
I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy. I also apologize to any gay person who wasted time and energy undergoing some form of reparative therapy because they believed that I had proven that reparative therapy works with some “highly motivated” individuals.
Robert Spitzer. M.D.
Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry,
Columbia University
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