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 Ultimately, Spitzer himself came to realize that his study had serious flaws, and rescinded the claims that he had made.
Read more about this topic: Ego-dystonic Sexual Orientation, Treatments, Disidentify With LGB
Famous quotes containing the words orientation, change and/or efforts:
“Every orientation presupposes a disorientation.”
—Hans Magnus Enzensberger (b. 1929)
“I acknowledge that the balance I have achieved between work and family roles comes at a cost, and every day I must weigh whether I live with that cost happily or guiltily, or whether some other lifestyle entails trade-offs I might accept more readily. It is always my choice: to change what I cannot tolerate, or tolerate what I cannot—or will not—change.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“The attempt to be an ideal parent, that is, to behave correctly toward the child, to raise her correctly, not to give to little or too much, is in essence an attempt to be the ideal child—well behaved and dutiful—of one’s own parents. But as a result of these efforts the needs of the child go unnoticed. I cannot listen to my child with empathy if I am inwardly preoccupied with being a good mother; I cannot be open to what she is telling me.”
—Alice Miller (20th century)