Jim Andris, Facebook

Homosexuality and Mental Illness

By Jim Andris For the Alestle

Within the medical profession attitudes toward homosexuality are shifting. Homosexuality is being viewed more and more as an alternative life style and less and less as an illness. One of the events which indicate this shift is the American Psychiatric Association's recent resolution. The Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses and/or dysfunctions. In so doing, it stated that homosexuality per se implied no impairment of individual capabilities and urged "the enactment of civil rights legislation at the local, state, and federal level that would offer homosexual citizens the same protections now guaranteed to others on the basis of race, creed, color, etc.," as well as "the repeal of all discriminatory legislation singling out homosexual acts by consenting adults in private." According to It's Time, the monthly news letter ofthe National Gay Task Force, Dr. Charles Socarides could muster only seven signatures on a petition for a revote on this resolution last June. The Advocate, however, reports that the AMA has forwarded to its Board of Trustees for further study a similar resolution by its Council on Mental Health. The resolution would also bring the AMA's policy in line with the American Law Institute's stand. Dissenters at the annual meeting of the AMA maintained that the resolution would endorse prostitution, and that that would be bad public relations.

Theories of mental illness have been influenced by predominant cultural values. Dr. George Weinberg in Society and the Healthy Homosexual has documented this. Freud in particular, he thinks, was guilty of defining as "neurotic" or "perverted" what was illegal in his day. Psychoanalysis holds that the aims of sexuality are innate, ending in marriage and child rearing. More and more lerning theorists hold that sexual responses are learned, not innate. Dr. Thomas Szasz, on the other hand, has likened psychoanalysists to preachers. They predefine homosexuality as a sin and procede to explain all their gay patients' problems in terms of their homosexuality. In place of Hell, the analyst warns that the patient will suffer "a dissolute life", if he does not choose the Right Way (heterosexuality). Dr. Szasz points out that of the thousands of articles on homosexuality in the psychoanalytic literature, there are few which encourage homosexuals to overcome the conflicts of the life they have chosen. He thinks this is because homosexuals are systematically rooted out of the profession.

Judd Marmor, in a working paper included in the Final Report of the National Institute of Mental Health Task Force on Homosexuality points out that the concept of mental health varies from culture to culture. Conformity to cultural standards cannot be used as a basis for defining mental health, he says because "it would automatically label as sick all those who rebel against unfair, unwise, or unhealthy cultural standards." He sites studies by Evelyn Hooker, a noted expert on homosexuality, which suggest that some homosexuals are reasonably well-adjusted and as "mentally healthy" as most heterosexuals. He nites that Hooker's studies are based on homosexuals who are not mental patients, in comparison to earlier studies of homoseuals who were patients.

The Final Report itself, released in 1969, notes that homosexuality presents a major problem to society, not because of any great danger to the community but "because of the amount of injustice and suffering entailed in it not only for the homosexual but also for those concerned about him." It concludes by recommending a NIMH Cener for the Study of Sexual Behavior which would "develop knowledge, generate and disseminate information, mollify taboos and myths, provide rational bases for intervention, and provide data to policymakers for use in their efforts to frame rational social policy."