Ego-dystonic Sexual Orientation - Treatments - Disidentify With LGB - Sexual Orientation Change Efforts

Sexual Orientation Change Efforts

The American Psychological Association "encourages mental health professionals to avoid misrepresenting the efficacy of sexual orientation change efforts by promoting or promising change in sexual orientation when providing assistance to individuals distressed by their own or others’ sexual orientation and concludes that the benefits reported by participants in sexual orientation change efforts can be gained through approaches that do not attempt to change sexual orientation". The APA reviewed research into the efficacy of efforts to change sexual orientation, and concluded that there was insufficient evidence to show whether these were effective or not. Participants have reported both harm and benefit from such efforts, but no causal relationship has been determined between either the benefit or the harm. According to a recent APA study, participants who reported harm generally reported "anger, anxiety, confusion, depression, grief, guilt, hopelessness, deteriorated relationships with family, loss of social support, loss of faith, poor self-image, social isolation, intimacy difficulties, intrusive imagery, suicidal ideation, self-hatred, and sexual dysfunction. These reports of perceptions of harm are countered by accounts of perceptions of relief, happiness, improved relationships with God, and perceived improvement in mental health status".

Robert L. Spitzer reported in 2003 that individuals who reported experiencing a change in sexual orientation had felt depressed or even suicidal prior to treatment "precisely because they had previously thought there was no hope for them, and they had been told by many mental health professionals that there was no hope for them, they had to just learn to live with their homosexual feelings." Spitzer's study, however, is widely considered disreputable in the therapeutic and mental-health community. The American Psychiatric Association enumerated many flaws in Spitzer's methods and analysis, and an American Psychological Association task force likewise scrutinized Spitzer's work and found it seriously flawed. A member of the association sponsoring the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior resigned in protest of Spitzer's paper being published therein. The degree to which Spitzer's claims were treated as authoritative by news media has been examined and found problematic. Ultimately, Spitzer himself came to realize that his study had serious flaws, and rescinded the claims that he had made.