This essay is mentioned in the interview below with Dr. Jeffrey Satinover that was conducted by David Virtue. The following was excerpted by Sarah Hey at Stand Firm. ed.
Thursday, May 15, 2008 • 10:30 am
I am linking to and excerpting from this masterful 24-page paper by Jeffrey Satinover, MD -- a diplomate of both the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and the C.G. Jung Institute of Zurich, Switzerland -- found on the Narth website. The paper demolishes the "scientific record" that the American Psychiatric Association [APA] depended on in its decision that homosexuality should no longer be described as a mental disorder, and should therefore be deleted from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM]. It's an immensely valuable paper to wade through, both in its understanding and detailing of the politics behind the change, as well as the deeply flawed and faux "science" articulated for the change.
The paper is divided into four parts:
Part I of the paper reviews the history of the diagnostic change that in 1973 removed homosexuality as a formal disorder from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a change that many now accept as simply indisputable in spite of the fact that it was based wholly on fiction. Parts II and III analyze the psychiatric guilds’ massive misrepresentation of the scientific record in the Supreme Court’s Lawrence v. Texas and Romer v. Evans cases. Part IV examines a key section of the two briefs used to define homosexuality as a “class,” a claim which (under precedent jurisprudence) depends upon homosexuality being an innate and immutable trait. (Racial “class” status is dependent upon “race,” a parameter that is relatively static with fixed meanings across studies.)
Today I'm going to excerpt a section of the first part of the paper regarding the process whereby gay activists won the DSM battle in the APA. It's important that we understand in detail just how little stone bridges are lost and how the gay activist lobby fought this particular battle.
From The Trojan Couch:
The Campaign Begins. A lifelong hard-left political activist, the psychologist Evelyn Hooker is more than anyone else credited by believerswith having demonstrated that homosexuality is normal. Even today, almost fifty years after its publication in 1957 in Projective Testing, her “The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual” is the only paper referenced in detail on the main website of the American Psychological Association in its discussion of Gay and Lesbian issues, as it attempts to make the case that there is no evidence for an association between homosexuality and psychopathology. Crucially, her study was one of the two upon which in 1973, the APA decided to remove homosexuality from the list of disorders in the DSM and the one study discussed in the APA’s brief in 2003 in the Lawrence case. It claims to show that “homosexuals [are] not inherently abnormal and that there [is] no difference between the pathologies of homosexual and heterosexual men.”
Eight years after her landmark study, she found herself chair of a newly-established National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Task Force on Homosexuality, hand-picked by Judd Marmor, an influential psychiatrist at UCLA. The only other “mental health” representatives were Alfred Kinsey’s close colleagues Paul Gebhard, and John Money, the latter a psychologist from Johns Hopkins and an early (but recently discredited and fired) proponent of transsexual surgery. In 1969 the Task Force issued its report. It claimed, parroting the Kinsey reports almost word-for-word, that sexuality was a continuum from exclusive homosexuality to exclusive heterosexuality, and that some degree of bisexuality was the human norm. Without evidence, it stated that any homosexual suffering was caused by societal prejudice. (It avoided mentioning, however, that in Kinsey’s view, human sexual taste was almost infinitely malleable.) Thus, there was nothing problematic with homosexuality per se.
Within a few years, Marmor, who was active in anti-war, pro-abortion, and other “New Left” causes, became Vice-President of the APA. With Hooker and Marmor in such prominent roles, agitators outside the professions could count on their collaboration in organizing protests aimed at radicalizing an organization which until then, held to a tacit ethical creed of professionalism that prohibited them from using the public’s trust in their presumed scholarly expertise in circumscribed domains to exercise influence over general matters of civics. One can see the beginnings of a coordinated effort to corrupt this ethos at the APA’s 1970 annual meeting, when a most eminent and respected psychiatrist and psychoanalyst (and later a founder of NARTH) presenting a paper on “homosexuality and transsexualism” was interrupted by an outside agitator who had been secretly bought into the meeting. Acceding to pressure, the organizers of the 1971 conference agreed to sponsor a special panel —not on homosexuality, but by homosexuals: (N.b.: The state of sexuality constituted their sole purported expertise to speak professionally, just as though being tall made one an expert in the mechanisms of cell growth, or having cancer.) The program chairman had been warned that if the panel was not approved, homosexual activists would ruin the entire convention. The APA caved. The only psychiatrist at this presentation would be the moderator, Robert Spitzer of Columbia University, a sympathizer in large measure on “civil rights,” not scientific grounds, in his later recollection.
After this quick capitulation, the activists decided to seek more. Progressive psychiatrists, gay psychiatrists, and outside activists planned a disruption and sought the services of leftwing activist Frank Kameny, who turned for help to the New Left and non-accomodationist Gay Liberation Front. Kameny’s cadre, with forged credentials provided by allies on the inside (some at the very top), broke into a special lifetime service award meeting. They grabbed the microphone, and Kameny declared “Psychiatry is the enemy incarnate. Psychiatry has waged a relentless war of extermination against us. . . . We’re rejecting you all as our owners. You may take this as our declaration of war.” Regardless, a few hours later, the promised panel discussion—presented by the same group of protesters—proceeded without objection by the APA.
The activists soon secured an appearance before the APA’s crucial Committee on Nomenclature and Statistics, responsible for publishing the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Loosely coordinated with the international classification of medical diseases, the enormously influential DSM had defined homosexuality medically, on a par with many other sexual “deviations” because homosexuals did not have an adult person of the opposite sex as their primary object of sexual interest. The APA was now being pressured—both from within and from without—to change its classification, and created a special task force comprised almost entirely of the same people from the Kinsey Institute who had packed the NIMH committee. Judd Marmor was now APA Vice-President, while the President-elect was a homosexual who would keep that fact secret (see below for more details).
Spitzer, who would become the pre-eminent expert in the classification of mental disorders on a statistical basis and the overall director of psychiatry’s official classification system, was then a consultant to the Nomenclature Committee. He did not believe homosexualityso intrinsically and self-evidently a “bad thing” that it warranted being listed in a manual of disorders alongside, say, schizophrenia—an evident truth, especially for a profession struggling to find empirical grounding in biological science and turning against the dominance of psychoanalysis and a threatening increase in competing, purely psychological theories and professions. He arranged a meeting between the Committee and a group of outside activists and gay psychiatrists and psychologists. The Committee was impressed, writes Bayer, by the “sober and professional manner” in which Charles Silverstein, Ph.D., (who would later author The Joy of Gay SexandThe New Joy of Gay Sex) presented the homosexual case. And, crucially, “Since none of the Committee members was an expert on homosexuality, there was considerable interest in the data that had been presented, much of which was new to those who would have to evaluate the issues raised by the call for a revised nomenclature” (my emphasis, on the fact that such a crucial decision, affecting so many in society, and so much, was going to be made by so few knowing so little about the subject matter being presented to them, and in so poor a position to judge the scientific quality of the representation).
Silverstein led off with Hooker’s work. He also introduced some of Kinsey’s arguments—but only some. He emphasized Kinsey’s claims about the frequency of homosexuality, but like the NIMH committee before him, passed over in silence the fact that Kinsey considered sexuality to be mutable. Wardell Pomeroy, co-author of the first Kinsey volume and (like all his male colleagues) one of Kinsey’s lovers, argued that the Kinsey data found that homosexuality was not associated with psychopathology and that all other studies of homosexuality were intrinsically flawed because they were based on “clinical” samples rather than samples from the regular population—as though this were not precisely what a quantitative comparative pathography would require. Even so, both statements were flat falsehoods, especially outrageous in that the Kinsey data itself—for which he himself was largely responsible—was fraudulently skewed by blatant population sampling biases, and the badgering and even bribing of its imprisoned and largely otherwise institutionalized subjects, which were not reported as such. Pomeroy admitted this in a book published shortly before this very meeting—which even so, he neglected to mention.
Spitzer presented NIMH’s official position on homosexuality. According to Psychiatric News, it was “essentially upon the rationale of Dr. Spitzer’s presentation that the Board made its decision.” In it, he argued for normalizing homosexuality because:
1. “Exclusive homosexuality” was a normal part of the human condition, a claim based on Kinsey’s data.
2. Homosexuality did not meet the requirements of a psychiatric disorder since it “does not either regularly cause subjective distress or is regularly associated with some
generalized impairment in social effectiveness or functioning [sic].”
3. Marcel T. Saghir and Eli Robins’ recently publishedMale and Female Homosexuality showed that homosexuality was normal. (Their research—which was astoundingly
shoddy—was roundly criticized by colleagues at the time, but no critique was addressed by the presenter or the committee.)
Although Spitzer did not say so then, in later correspondence he has said that another important component of the case was the work of Evelyn Hooker. The APA committee, however, failed to reference critical studies, such as Robins’ and Saghir’s suicide studies, and their study that found differences in the behavioral patterns and psychology of homosexuals and heterosexuals. These differences would have complicated Hooker’s findings—at least in the grossly oversimplified and misrepresented form in which Hooker’s findings were presented.
Nonetheless, quickly following the advice of the new homosexual advisors, two-thirds of the APA’s Board of Trustees (barely a quorum) voted to remove homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder, with only two abstentions. A few voices formally appealed to the membership at large—scarcely a scientificmodus operandi, either. Countering this appeal, every psychiatrist (tens of thousands) received a mailing urging them to support the change, purportedly for legitimate data-based reasons and apparently “from” the APA, but in fact surreptitiously financed entirely by the National Gay Task Force. Two-thirds of those members who did subsequently vote, voted to support the change—but only one-third of the membership responded (and far from all psychiatrists belonged to the APA to begin with). Four years later a survey in the journal Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality showed that 69 percent of psychiatrists disagreed with the vote, and still considered homosexuality a disorder.
No comments:
Post a Comment