Robert Spitzer, chair of the DSM-III task force and referred to as “the father of modern psychiatry” in a front-page story on the New York Times today, has issued an apology and recanted a study that supported the now-discredited “Reparative Therapy,” which claimed to “cure” homosexuality.
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Better late than never. This scientist certainly has guts to change his view in a conservative country as the US is. Perhaps dr. Phil McGraw will have the guts now to take the stand when he is doing his show on homosexuality.
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Meanwhile, people running the subcommittees on sexual and gender identity for the DSM V–Kenneth J. Zucker and Ray Blanchard–promote “reparative therapy” for transgender children. We have a long way to go.
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Hopefully one day psychiatry can apologize to all the people it has claimed were ‘sick’.
Spitzer’s just an old man concerned with his legacy who still believes in psychiatry’s other BS.
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1boringoldman has a great post on Spitzer’s apology at http://1boringoldman.com/index.php/2012/04/25/humility/
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Commendable as this may be I think that the “Father of Modern Psychiatry was not Robert Spitzer but rather Dr. Ewen Cameron.
If you google him and read his Wikipedia article you will find he was trained in the thirties about the same time and similarly to the psychiatrists in Germany. They solved the problem of people with mental illness so efficiently that the NAZI’S carried on to deal with people whose genes were almost as defective as mentally ill people. People like Jews, Gays, and Gypsies.
Fortunately Ewen Cameron did not live in Germany, but lived in Canada where He became President of the Canadian and U.S. Psychiatric Associations and eventually became the Founding President of the World Psychiatric Associations all very influential positions. So influential that when people started voice concerns about his role in the MK-ULTRA program he was able to continue and die a natural death in 1967. It became a small blip in his career. He was able steer psychiatry away from expensive therapies like psycho- analysis to the more efficient and less costly biologically based therapy where mentally ill people could have their personalities changed by the simple administration of chemmicals.
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