Last Friday, the renowned American psychiatrist, Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, died due to cardiovascular problems.
Dr. Spitzer was the psychiatrist who pioneered the use of scientific standards to describe and diagnose mental disorders in the 1970s, a time when psychoanalysis was mainstream psychiatry and diagnoses could change dichotomously between mental disorders. psychiatrists. Dr. Spitzer’s works helped draw a line between what was a disorder and what was not. But his most important contribution was the exclusion of homosexuality, as a mental disorder, from the third edition of the most important manual of psychiatric diagnoses, the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).
In 1973, Dr. Spitzer evaluated whether homosexuality caused any harmful effects on people’s well-being and found no data to support the idea that homosexuality was a mental disorder.
With the evidence in hand, he fought in the edition of the DSM-3 so that the diagnosis of mental disorder was changed to: “disturbance of sexual orientation” which meant the first step in the acceptance and depathologization of homosexuality.
“The fact that gay marriage is allowed today is due in part to Bob Spitzer,” said Jack Drescher, a renowned New York psychoanalyst, in an interview with .
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But in 2001 he published research, despite recommendations from his colleagues not to do so, on the effectiveness of conversion therapies or “gay reparation.” For that research he recruited 200 men and women from different centers in the United States, interviewed them by telephone about their sexual needs, feelings and behaviors before receiving conversion therapy and evaluated the people’s responses. Comparing the responses he found that the majority of participants had reported that they had changed from a homosexual orientation to a heterosexual orientation.
In a , Spitzer explains that previous research on conversion therapy had been inconclusive and that he was motivated to know its effect and furthermore, no one could accuse him of being biased or against homosexuality, because he himself had promoted the elimination of homosexuality from psychiatric manuals.
But things did not turn out as Spitzer thought: the gay community accused him of being a traitor and his scientific peers received him with strong criticism, since his research was based only on the reports of participants who declared whether they had changed their orientation or not, which which is not sufficient evidence to maintain that there is a change, people lie on tests or their story may be subject to changes in mood or needs.
Other psychiatrists said their research was against the code of ethics because it could increase the suffering, prejudice and discrimination of gay people.
“When I read all those comments, I realized that I was in trouble, a big problem, that I couldn’t respond to. How can you tell if a person has really changed?” Dr. Spitzer said.
Eleven years later, Spitzer retracted his research, apologized, and said it was the only thing he regretted in his entire professional career.
Even with that stain on his professional resume, Dr. Spitzer was recognized by the psychiatric community as one of the most important psychiatrists of our era.
Dr. Allen J. Frances, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Duke University in an email to The New York Times, said:
“Bob Spitzer was by far the most influential psychiatrist of his time. “He saved the field and its millions of patients from a crisis of credibility, raising its scientific standards and rescuing it from arbitrariness and baseless opinions.”
Shortly after retiring, in 2013, Dr. Spitzer was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, but that did not limit his intellectual work and during the following years he continued to help in the development of the DSM-5.
Fountain: