Spitzer Apologizes for Ex-Gay Study

Dr. Robert Spitzer was the psychiatrist who led the fight in the early 70s to get homosexuality removed Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association, but in 2001 he published a study in which he said that highly motivated patients can, through therapy, convert from gay to straight. He has now retracted that study and apologized for it in a letter to the journal in which it was published. Truth Wins Out has the full text:

Several months ago I told you that because of my revised view of my 2001 study of reparative therapy changing sexual orientation, I was considering writing something that would acknowledge that I now judged the major critiques of the study as largely correct. After discussing my revised view of the study with Gabriel Arana, a reporter for American Prospect, and with Malcolm Ritter, an Associated Press science writer, I decided that I had to make public my current thinking about the study. Here it is.

Basic Research Question. From the beginning it was: “can some version of reparative therapy enable individuals to change their sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual?” Realizing that the study design made it impossible to answer this question, I suggested that the study could be viewed as answering the question, “how do individuals undergoing reparative therapy describe changes in sexual orientation?” – a not very interesting question.

The Fatal Flaw in the Study – There was no way to judge the credibility of subject reports of change in sexual orientation. I offered several (unconvincing) reasons why it was reasonable to assume that the subject’s reports of change were credible and not self-deception or outright lying. But the simple fact is that there was no way to determine if the subject’s accounts of change were valid.

I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy. I also apologize to any gay person who wasted time and energy undergoing some form of reparative therapy because they believed that I had proven that reparative therapy works with some “highly motivated” individuals.

Robert Spitzer. M.D.

Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry,

Columbia University

As many others have noted, anti-gay and ex-gay groups have cited the Spitzer study over and over again over the last 11 years. This retraction removes any shred of credibility they might have had in doing so.