Psychiatry Giant Sorry for Backing Gay ‘Cure’

[morningfog]

PRINCETON, N.J. — 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.

* * *

Now here he was at his computer, ready to recant a study he had done himself, a poorly conceived 2003 investigation that supported the use of so-called reparative therapy to “cure” homosexuality for people strongly motivated to change.

What to say? The issue of gay marriage was rocking national politics yet again. The California State Legislature was debating a bill to ban the therapy outright 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.

And he would later learn that a World Health Organization report, released on Thursday, calls the therapy “a serious threat to the health and well-being — even the lives — of affected people.”

Dr. Spitzer’s fingers jerked over the keys, unreliably, as if choking on the words. And then it was done: a short letter to be published this month, in the same journal where the original study appeared.

“I believe,” it concludes, “I owe the gay community an apology.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/health/dr-robert-l-spitzer-noted-psychiatrist-apologizes-for-study-on-gay-cure.html?_r=1

[longship]

1. Wow! What an emotional account. nt

[xfundy]

2. Screw him. He phoned it in, literally. He had no skin in the game.

At the time it was obvious most of his subjects were hand-chosen by the
"change" propagandists. The damage has been done, and this does little to change that.

Probably saw a chance to get his name in the news again and was vain enough to go for it. Shameful.

Hundreds of thousands, hell, millions, of gay people were negatively affected by the animus his "conclusions" allowed the political operatives of the "christian"--actually, a literally "antichrist" organization -- to obfuscate, spread even more lies and hate and misinformation about the fact that gay people are PEOPLE, here now and always, always, always, throughout history.

I'm so sick and goddamn tired of having to feel that I have to defend my right to my very existence each and every day.