Originally Posted by hot dragon

(from part two)

In 1970 90% of the American Psychiatric Association believed that homosexuality was a pathology, today 90% believe that it's a normal variant of sexual behaviour. No more pathological than something like left handedness

Now prior to Evelyn Hooker, all the research in homosexuality, all of it, was done on people who were already under serious psychiatric treatment. Let me repeat that. In the history of psychiatric research no one had ever conducted a study on a homosexual population that wasn't either in therapy, or prison, or mental hospital, or the disciplinary barracks of the armed services

Hooker's study challenged the idea that homosexuality was a pathology in the first place, and in doing this it not only called into question an entire generation of research on homosexuality, it also challenged psychiatry's basic concept of disease. If you believed Hooker's data, then the only conclusion you could come to was that psychiatry was deciding that certain behaviours were diseases, not out of any sort of scientific proof, but based on their own prejudices

(since then there has been hundreds of other scientific publicatins supporting evelyn hooker. nothing identifies anything pathological)

The change happened partly through scientific debate and partly, simply because psychiatrists got to know gay men.

(so the eye witnesses do not recall a vote)

On December 15th, 1973 this president and this board called a press conference where they announced to the world that they had approved the deletion of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistics Manual. Charles Socarides naturally was appalled.

Charles Socarides: I said holy s**t, they are changing the rules.

(charles socarides has been the most outspoken psychiatrist supporting the idea that homosexuality is pathological. it is not concieveable that there could have been a public vote without his involvement or recollection of it)

Even today you find opponents of the change who believe that the APA caved to political pressure, and proponents who claim that anyone who opposed the change was blinded by social prejudice. In other words each side continues to charge the other with being unscientific.

(sound familiar?)

A true believer in the psychoanalytic method, Socarides felt his research was sound and that he was, as he told me, doing God's work.

(unsurprisingly, the proponents of homosexuals being sick is driven by his religious beliefs. like it always is)

All In The Mind - 11August2007 - 81 Words: the inside story of psychiatry and homosexuality (Part 2 of 2)

i hope you realised that the comments in parentheses are my own. the full story is easy to read. i hope the links work.

as it should be, the true story describes a genuine scientific debate. an old idea is challenged with new evidence, debated by those informed and experienced and the old paradigm discarded for the new. science as it should be. no record of a vote, no pressure from anyone outside the APA. just an assessment of the evidence by the people designated and equipped to do so.