In 1973, when Columbia University psychiatry professor Robert Spitzer, M.D., chaired the committee that oversaw the revision of the first edition of APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), he brought to the APA Board of Trustees the controversial proposal that homosexuality should be dropped as a psychiatric diagnosis.

Spitzer stressed that there were no valid data linking sexual orientation to mental illness and that studies showed that homosexuals functioned just as well as heterosexuals.

The Board overwhelmingly agreed with Spitzer, and when DSM-II appeared, only the concept of ego-dystonic homosexuality remained as a way to categorize those who were unhappy with their sexual orientation. That diagnosis, whose inclusion was also proposed by Spitzer, was deleted from the next edition of the diagnostic manual.

Now 28 years later, Spitzer has ignited a controversy involving the same topic, and it has become the focus of media attention throughout the country.

Speaking at APA’s 2001 annual meeting in New Orleans in May, Spitzer maintained that so-called reparative psychotherapies can and have successfully changed homosexuals into heterosexuals and that he has the data to prove it.

. . .

APA issued a press release at the annual meeting in which Medical Director Steven Mirin, M.D., emphasized that “APA maintains there is no published scientific evidence supporting the efficacy of reparative therapy as a treatment to change one’s sexual orientation.”

The press release points out that APA does not endorse annual meeting presentations and that many papers presented at the meeting “have not been subject to traditional peer review, nor have they been published in the scientific literature.”