Dr. Robert Spritzer, the physician responsible for the 1973 declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness, died on Friday, December 25, 2015. Until 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) had considered homosexuality pathological. Their Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), originally published in 1952, is the widely respected diagnostic tool for mental health providers in the United States. It was in the DSM that several normal human qualities, including homosexuality, were portrayed as disorders and ailments rather than normal, natural human behavior. [...]
Dr. Ronald Bayer is a professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University. "If [you were] homosexual and [felt] deeply distressed about it, that was a psychiatric diagnosis that was treatable by psychiatry," he said in an interview Broadly, adding that this thinking also eventually evolved. "[Spitzer] was deeply involved in [asking], 'What are the criteria used to define a mental illness? Is it simply subjective distress?' If a person felt distressed about being black, we wouldn't say, 'Well, maybe we can turn them into a white person... The African American Civil Rights Movement played a significant role shaping the discourse at that time," Dr. Bayer explained. [...]
Spitzer's advocacy culminated with the release of the new diagnostic manual, DSM III. Not only was homosexuality declassified, but neurosis itself was removed, which challenged the status quo of mid-twentieth century mental health medicine. "[It] was a huge watermark. Finally, in DSM III, they actually eliminated the concept of neurosis as a conceptual framework for psychiatric disorders, which was a central contribution of psychoanalytic thought," said Dr. Bayard, noting that this constituted a remarkable rupture in dominant thinking a the time. "Psychoanalysis was the dominant paradigm in psychiatry through the 1950s and 60s. Every major school that taught psychology was chaired by people with psychoanalytic training."
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