One of the most influential figures in modern psychiatry has apologized to the US gay community for a scientific study which supported attempts to “cure” people of their homosexuality.
The survey, published in 2001, looked at “reparative therapy” and was hailed by religious and social conservatives in the US as proof that gay people could successfully become straight if they were motivated to do so.
However, Robert Spitzer has now apologized in the same academic journal that published his original study, calling it “fatally flawed.”
“I believe I owe the gay community an apology,” his letter said. “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.”
Spitzer’s letter, which was leaked online before its publication in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, is sure to cause delight among gay civil rights groups and stir up anger among social conservatives, who have used the study to combat the acceptance of homosexuality as a normal part of human society.
Reparative therapy is popular among Christian conservative groups, which run clinics and therapy sessions at which people try to become heterosexual through counseling.
Gay rights activists condemn such practices as motivated by religious faith, not science and call them “pray away the gay” groups.
Spitzer’s study looked at the experiences of 200 people undertaking the therapy, including subjects provided by religious groups. He then asked each person the same set of questions, analyzing their responses to the therapy and their feelings and sexual urges afterward. He concluded that many of them reported feelings of changes in their sexual desires from homosexual to heterosexual.
Spitzer’s stance was notorious, because in 1973 he had been instrumental in getting the American Psychiatric Association to stop classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder in its diagnostic manual: a move seen at the time as a major victory for gay rights.
His 2001 study caused a huge stir because many people felt that it was not rigorous enough for publication. The central criticism was that Spitzer had not paid enough attention to the fact that subjects might lie about their feelings or be engaged in self-deception.
For more than a decade Spitzer shrugged off the attacks and stood by his work, but he has now admitted that his critics were right.
“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,” Spitzer wrote.
In an interview with the New York Times last week, Spitzer, who is 79 and suffers from Parkinson’s disease, described how he had written his letter of recantation in the middle of the night after agonizing over the study’s impact.
He had also recently been visited by gay magazine journalist Gabriel Arana who had described to him his own experience going through reparation therapy, how damaging it had been and how it had led to thoughts of suicide.
“It is the only regret I have; the only professional one,” Spitzer told the New York Times, which described him as being almost in tears as he talked about his decision to admit he was wrong.
“In the history of psychiatry I do not know that I have ever seen a scientist write a letter saying that the data were all there, but were totally misinterpreted. Who admitted that and who apologized to his readers. That’s something, don’t you think?” Spitzer told the newspaper.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS