Another article that I found interesting by Dr. Jeffery Satinover, discusses the reasons that many suffering from SSA disorder continue to be misled into thinking that they not only ought to, but must accept their condition. Some interesting snippets:
Fairytales remind us of those simple truths that, as adults, we no longer wish to accept. “The Emperor’s New Robes†shows us that in every generation, on certain matters, a whole society—its experts, its most admired, respected, and trusted leaders and counselors—will adopt as authoritative a complete illusion. Some of my psychiatric and psychological colleagues have woven for themselves their own set of illusory robes of authority, and for the past thirty-five years have been proclaiming doctrines in the public square that depend upon the authority that derives from the public’s belief that these robes exist. In particular, they have claimed to the Supreme Court that the scientific data show that homosexuals form a “class†whose boundaries are defined by a stable “trait.†This presumption is false, yet the recent Supreme Court decisions pertaining to same-sex marriage have taken it for granted.
[snip] It seems that one person can make quite a difference!
A lifelong hard-left political activist, the psychologist Evelyn Hooker is more than anyone else credited by believers with having demonstrated that homosexuality is normal. Even today, almost fifty years after its publication in 1957 in Projective Testing, her “The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual†is the only paper referenced in detail on the main website of the American Psychological Association in its discussion of Gay and Lesbian issues, as it attempts to make the case that there is no evidence for an association between homosexuality and psychopathology.
Crucially, her study was one of the two upon which in 1973, the APA decided to remove homosexuality from the list of disorders in the DSM and the one study discussed in the APA’s brief in 2003 in the Lawrence case. It claims to show that “homosexuals [are] not inherently abnormal and that there [is] no difference between the pathologies of homosexual and heterosexual men.â€
Yes, so the APA used Kinsey’s disreputable data “fenced” through an intervening study to come to it “unscientific” conclusion that SSA is not a disorder. And now, this activist is put in a very influential position.
Eight years after her landmark study, she found herself chair of a newly-established National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Task Force on Homosexuality, hand-picked by Judd Marmor, an influential psychiatrist at UCLA. The only other “mental health†representatives were Alfred Kinsey’s close colleagues Paul Gebhard, and John Money, the latter a psychologist from Johns Hopkins and an early (but recently discredited and fired) proponent of transsexual surgery. In 1969 the Task Force issued its report. It claimed, parroting the Kinsey reports almost word-for-word, that sexuality was a continuum from exclusive homosexuality to exclusive heterosexuality, and that some degree of bisexuality was the human norm. Without evidence, it stated that any homosexual suffering was caused by societal prejudice. (It avoided mentioning, however, that in Kinsey’s view, human sexual taste was almost infinitely malleable.) Thus, there was nothing problematic with homosexuality per se.
[snip] And what was the panel that got the ball rolling on changing the APA’s policy? Well, it wasn’t made up of psychiatrists:
One can see the beginnings of a coordinated effort to corrupt this ethos at the APA’s 1970 annual meeting, when a most eminent and respected psychiatrist and psychoanalyst (and later a founder of NARTH) presenting a paper on “homosexuality and transsexualism†was interrupted by an outside agitator who had been secretly bought into the meeting.4 Acceding to pressure, the organizers of the 1971 conference agreed to sponsor a special panel—not on homosexuality, but by homosexuals: (N.b.: The state of sexuality constituted their sole purported expertise to speak professionally, just as though being tall made one an expert in the mechanisms of cell growth, or having cancer.) The program chairman had been warned that if the panel was not approved, homosexual activists would ruin the entire convention. The APA caved. The only psychiatrist at this presentation would be the moderator, Robert Spitzer of Columbia University, a sympathizer in large measure on “civil rights,†not scientific grounds, in his later recollection.
[snip] And how much credibility is one to put in the final committee that took SSA off of the list of disorders? Not much:
The activists soon secured an appearance before the APA’s crucial Committee on Nomenclature and Statistics, responsible for publishing the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Loosely coordinated with the international classification of medical diseases, the enormously influential DSM had defined homosexuality medically, on a par with many other sexual “deviations†because homosexuals did not have an adult person of the opposite sex as their primary object of sexual interest. The APA was now being pressured—both from within and from without—to change its classification, and created a special task force comprised almost entirely of the same people from the Kinsey Institute who had packed the NIMH committee. Judd Marmor was now APA Vice-President, while the President-elect was a homosexual who would keep that fact secret…
[snip] And the committee was presented with Kinsey’s biased data:
Silverstein led off with Hooker’s work. He also introduced some of Kinsey’s arguments—but only some. He emphasized Kinsey’s claims about the frequency of homosexuality, but like the NIMH committee before him, passed over in silence the fact that Kinsey consideredsexuality to be mutable. Wardell Pomeroy, co-author of the first Kinsey volume and (like all his male colleagues) one of Kinsey’s lovers, argued that the Kinsey data found that homosexuality was not associated with psychopathology and that all other studies of homosexuality were intrinsically flawed because they were based on “clinical†samples rather than samples from the regular population—as though this were not precisely what a quantitative comparative pathography would require. Even so, both statements were flat falsehoods, especially outrageous in that the Kinsey data itself—for which he himself was largely responsible—was fraudulently skewed by blatant population sampling biases, and the badgering and even bribing of its imprisoned and largely otherwise institutionalized subjects, which were not reported as such. Pomeroy admitted this in a book published shortly before this very meeting—which even so, he neglected to mention.
[snip] So here is the what the final decision was based upon:
Spitzer presented NIMH’s official position on homosexuality. According to PsychiatricNews, it was “essentially upon the rationale of Dr. Spitzer’s presentation that the Board made its decision.†In it, he argued for normalizing homosexuality because: 1. “Exclusive homosexuality†was a normal part of the human condition, a claim based on Kinsey’s data. 2. Homosexuality did not meet the requirements of a psychiatric disorder since it “does not either regularly cause subjective distress or is regularly associated with somegeneralized impairment in social effectiveness or functioning [sic].†3. Marcel T. Saghir and Eli Robins’ recently published Male and Female Homosexuality showed that homosexuality was normal. (Their research—which was astoundingly shoddy—was roundly criticized by colleagues at the time, but no critique was addressed by the presenter or the committee.)
How many will continue to suffer before the modern perveyors of medical phlogiston and ether (actually these falsified theories were on much more solid ground than is the current fiction that SSA is “normal”) are debunked and the rest of medical science wakes up and is able to see nature as it is given?