Category: mental health

WorldNetDaily suddenly finds year old NARTH article newsworthy

A reader emailed me to say that the American Psychological Association had recently changed the official view on homosexuality causation to endorse an environmental set of causes. The prompt for the email was this article from WorldNetDaily: “‘Gay’ gene claim suddenly vanishes”
To arrive at this startling conclusion, the WND writer, Rob Unruh quotes an article published more than a year ago from NARTH titled, “APA’s New Pamphlet On Homosexuality De-emphasizes The Biological Argument, Supports A Client’s Right To Self-Determination.”
In the article, Dean Byrd notes that the APA document shifts emphasis on causes to a more nuanced and complex view. Byrd cites this quote:

“There is no consensus among scientists about the exact reasons that an individual develops a heterosexual, bisexual, gay or lesbian orientation. Although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social, and cultural influences on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors. Many think that nature and nurture both play complex roles…”

However, oddly, Byrd leaves this last phrase from the APA website out of his quote:

…most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation.

Also in the APA paper, reparative therapy is discussed. The APA says
What about therapy intended to change sexual orientation from gay to straight?

All major national mental health organizations have officially expressed concerns about therapies promoted to modify sexual orientation. To date, there has been no scientifically adequate research to show that therapy aimed at changing sexual orientation (sometimes called reparative or conversion therapy) is safe or effective. Furthermore, it seems likely that the promotion of change therapies reinforces stereotypes and contributes to a negative climate for lesbian, gay, and bisexual persons. This appears to be especially likely for lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals who grow up in more conservative religious settings.
Helpful responses of a therapist treating an individual who is troubled about her or his same-sex attractions include helping that person actively cope with social prejudices against homosexuality, successfully resolve issues associated with and resulting from internal conflicts, and actively lead a happy and satisfying life. Mental health professional organizations call on their members to respect a person’s (client’s) right to self-determination; be sensitive to the client’s race, culture, ethnicity, age, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, socioeconomic status, language, and disability status when working with that client; and eliminate biases based on these factors.

From these paragraphs expressing concern, Byrd pulls out this sentence to portray a greater openness to change therapy than is warranted:

“Mental health organizations call on their members to respect a person’s [client’s] right to self-determination.”

I blogged about this article last year when it came out, commending the APA for their nuanced account of the research to that point. I think NARTH should do what the APA did a year ago and issue a statement about environmental causes. Then I wondered:

…when NARTH would make an APA-like statement about theorized environmental factors such as child abuse and same-sex parenting deficits. What if NARTH acknowledged “what most scientists have long known: that a bio-psycho-social model of causation best fits the data?” Wouldn’t there be a need for a statement cautioning readers of their materials that evidence for parenting playing a large or determining role is meager? Paralleling Dr. Byrd’s assessment of the APA pamphlet, shouldn’t NARTH say with italics, “There is no homogenic family. There is no simple familial pathway to homosexuality.”…
I wrote Dean and asked him about NARTH’s stance. He answered for himself by saying,

I think that the bio-psycho-social model of causation makes it clear that there is neither a simple biological or environmental pathway to homosexuality.

NARTH is widely known for championing a view of homosexuality that requires some kind of trauma as a causal factor. In point of fact, SSA can occur without bad parenting or abuse. Shouldn’t NARTH follow the APA’s lead and issue an official statement such as suggested above?
UPDATE: OneNewsNow and AFTAH have joined the echo chamber.
The ONN account begins:

The attempt to prove that homosexuality is determined biologically has been dealt a knockout punch. An American Psychological Association publication includes an admission that there’s no homosexual “gene” — meaning it’s not likely that homosexuals are born that way.

I wonder if NARTH will correct this misunderstanding of the APA’s publication. In fact, no knockout punch has been delivered to any theory, except perhaps for those dogmatic views that stress one pathway. Let’s see leaving aside extreme biological determinism, who else gets a knockout punch here? The APA statement cuts both ways but NARTH, and the people quoted in this report only want to see it go one way.
The APA (over a year ago) handled the research with integrity. When will NARTH and related groups do the same?

Multiple pathways to sexual orientation, Part 1

On other threads, we have discussed why reparative therapy vignettes and ex-gay testimonies are so often alike. I have suggested that there are different causal pathways which lead to different sexual orientation outcomes. Also, therapists like Joe Nicolosi and Richard Cohen have strong public positions which promote a particular causal narrative. Clients who may have histories in line with those narratives seek counseling from those therapists. The same dynamic likely occurs in Exodus ministries where unhappy people seek help based on reading or hearing public testimonies.
People seeking help for unhappiness might be more likely to have life circumstances which they view as causal. Therapists looking for such causes ask questions which validate the hunches. It seems easy enough to imagine how therapists and clients can arrive at a common narrative without even trying to do so.
Same-sex attracted people who have not been traumatized in some way often react with puzzlement and frustration when, like palm readers, therapists go through a litany of questions about non-existent past trauma, seeking some confirmation of the predicted narrative. Eventually small, forgotten hurts and deprivations are identified as evidence for the expected patterns.
While I believe this occurs often, I have no idea how often. I also am pretty sure that the histories of some people are relevant to their sexual attractions. The research on the variability of pathways to sexual orientation is sparse but there is some and it demonstrates that on average same-sex attracted people who seek help of some kind (therapy or Exodus) recall more troubling relationships with parents than same-sex attracted people who have not sought therapy or ministry help.
The primary reference in this regard is Bell, Weinberg & Hammersmith (1981) Sexual preference: Its development in men and women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. An important section on the differences between clinical and nonclinical groups is reprinted here from pages 202-203.

Homosexuals in Therapy
More than half of the WHMs [white homosexual males] (58%) said that at one time or another they had sought help for a personal or emotional problem from a professional counselor such as a psychiatrist or a psychologist. Most previous studies of the development of male homosexuality have been based on the reports of homosexuals “in treatment,” and many scholars have tried to generalize their findings to other homosexuals as well. When our own findings failed to support so many widely held clinical views, we were curious to see whether the reports of respondents who had been in therapy would differ from those made by respondents who had never sought professional counseling or therapy.
What we found was that those respondents “ever in treatment” did indeed have the kinds of paternal variables in their model that were consistent with what clinicians have always thought to be typical of homosexual males. The path model of those “never in treatment,” on the other hand, either did not contain such variables or showed their influence to be weaker. For example, as the literature suggests, the “therapy” group tended to have Detached-Hostile Father (t.e.= .29), a variable that is tied to the son’s gender nonconformity and early homosexual experiences. This variable does not even appear in the model for the men who have never been in therapy, however. Moreover, although the “nontherapy” group had more Negative Relationships with their Fathers, this variable (t.e.= .11) did not influence their gender nonconformity at all. In addition, two other variables that were important for the therapy group — Cold father and Negative Image of Father — do not appear at all for the nontherapy males. Although the rest of the path model is much the same for both groups, clearly the model for the therapy group corresponds much more closely to the way fathers have been considered in theories about the etiology of male homosexuality.
How might this discrepancy be explained? On the one hand, it could be supposed that cold, detached fathers make for troubled sons who are likely to seek psychological treatment at some point in their lives. Likewise, it could be argued that “therapy” often involves an “education” of client by the therapist in which the client comes to believe what the therapist supposes must be true of the client’s parents. Alternatively, it could also be argued that fathers tend to withdraw (become detached) from psychologically troubled sons, who are later to seek psychological counseling.
Whatever the case may be, at least on the basis of what our respondents could remember about their parents, Cold or Detached-Hostile Fathers cannot be regarded as important in the development of male homosexuality in general, since their alleged influence does not even appear among those who neve sought therapy or counseling. Finally, it should be noted that the differences between the therapy and non-therapy groups do not stem from differences between these two groups in terms of effeminacy or bisexuality. We found no significant correlations between being exclusively homosexual and having been in therapy, the more effeminate WHMs were only somewhat more likely than the non-effeminate WHMs ever to have been in therapy (64% versus 54%).

Bell et al, also compared WHMs and WHTMs (white, heterosexual males) who had and had not been in therapy. The findings regarding these comparisons are not drawn out in the same manner as above. However, there is a footnote on page 202 briefly describing the analysis.

The path analysis on which these findings were based included all the white heterosexual males, whether or not they had been “in treatment.” Separate analyses, one comparing only those WHMs and WHTMs “ever in treatment” and and one comparing those WHMs and WHTMs “never in treatment” replicated the results reported above.

For women, the picture was somewhat different. The authors noted that 2/3rds of the WHW had been in therapy and then on page 209, they wrote:

We do find some differences between the path model for the women who had been in therapy and those who had not. Notably, Childhood Gender Nonconformity appears to have been a more important factor for the respondents who had been in therapy or counseling (t.e.= .71 versus .52 for the women who had never been in therapy or counseling.)
In addition, the path model for the homosexual women who had in therapy or counseling includes two variables pertaining to a sense of estrangement or unhappiness while they were growing up: Unhappiness in Adolescence (B=.14) and Felt Different from Other Girls in High School (B=.11). The path model for the nontherapy group contains no comparable measures.
Finally the path model for the women who had been in therapy or counseling includes two variables pertaining to an unhappy recollection of the mothers: Negative Relationship with Mothers (t.e. = .24) and Unpleasant Mother (t.e. = .22). The nontherapy group on the other hand, appear to have been slightly more influenced by their fathers. Their path shows significant — but weak — paths from Weak Father (t.e. = .20), Aloof Father (t.e. = .14), Controlling Father (t.e. = -.10), and Mother Dominated Father (t.e. = .14). Otherwise, the differences between the women in therapy or counseling and those with no such experience show little pattern.

In the path analysis procedure used in Bell et al’s research, the “t.e.” you see repeated throughout this passage refers to the “total effect” of one variable on another, in this case sexual preference. Think of it as a measure of the strength of effect of each variable mentioned and sexual orientation, with the larger numbers representing a larger effect. While there are many points we could discuss here, the primary reason for this series is to examine the possibility that multiple paths exist which yield the direction of sexual attractions. A practical implication is that therapists who frequently counsel those who are seeking help probably get a skewed picture of same-sex attracted people in general. Another implication is the effects noted by the reparative drive theorists are not huge and must rely on other pre- and post-natal factors. Also, those who take a solely biological perspective should expand the complexity of their model to consider that the sexual behavior of some people are influenced by certain environment experiences.
The next posts in this series will include additional research as well as more results from Bell et al. Some research does find differences between gay and straight groups on developmental recollections. What do these differences mean? Stay tuned…

Did Masters and Johnson fake the gay change cases?

Lots of stuff today…
Here is something worth looking into; a new book by Thomas Maier questions the claims of Masters and Johnson that 70% of their homosexual clients changed orientation.
John Tierney’s blog points to an article in Scientific American by Maier which summarizes the topic.

Back in 1979, on Meet The Press and countless other TV appearances, Masters and Johnson touted their book, Homosexuality in Perspective—a 14-year study of more than 300 homosexual men and women—hoping to build on their groundbreaking sex studies of heterosexuals that had helped ignite America’s sexual revolution. The results seemed impressive: Of the 67 male and female patients with “homosexual dissatisfaction,” only 14 failed in the initial two-week “conversion” or “reversion” treatment. (The 12 cases of attempted “conversion” were for men and women who had always believed they were homosexual and were troubled by it, while the 55 “reversion” cases were in people who believed their homosexuality was more fleeting.) During five years of follow-up, their success rate for both groups was better than 70 percent.
But were Masters and Johnson’s claims of “conversion” in those 12 cases — nine men and three women — even true?

This is an important question given the reputation of Masters and Johnson. Numerous conversion therapy groups have referred to their work as evidence of change (e.g., this Narth paper).
There’s more:

Prior to the book’s publication, doubts arose about the validity of their case studies. Most staffers never met any of the conversion cases during the study period of 1968 through 1977, according to research I’ve done for my new book Masters of Sex. Clinic staffer Lynn Strenkofsky, who organized patient schedules during this period, says she never dealt with any conversion cases. Marshall and Peggy Shearer, perhaps the clinic’s most experienced therapy team in the early 1970s, says they never treated homosexuals and heard virtually nothing about conversion therapy.
When the clinic’s top associate, Robert Kolodny, asked to see the files and to hear the tape-recordings of these “storybook” cases, Masters refused to show them to him. Kolodny—who had never seen any conversion cases himself—began to suspect some, if not all, of the conversion cases were not entirely true. When he pressed Masters, it became ever clearer to him that these were at best composite case studies made into single ideal narratives, and at worst they were fabricated.
Eventually Kolodny approached Virginia Johnson privately to express his alarm. She, too, held similar suspicions about Masters’ conversion theory, though publicly she supported him. The prospect of public embarrassment, of being exposed as a fraud, greatly upset Johnson, a self-educated therapist who didn’t have a college degree and depended largely on her husband’s medical expertise.
With Johnson’s approval, Kolodny spoke to their publisher about a delay, but it came too late in the process. “That was a bad book,” Johnson recalled decades later. Johnson said she favored a rewriting and revision of the whole book “to fit within the existing [medical] literature,” and feared that Bill simply didn’t know what he was talking about. At worst, she said, “Bill was being creative in those days” in the compiling of the “gay conversion” case studies.

Being creative? One member of the M&J team had no first hand knowledge of the results and wanted to back away from the claims. I would say this is a significant problem.
Maier continues:

Until he died in 2001 Masters felt confident their book would be embraced eventually by the medical community, not just by purveyors of religious or political agendas. He believed the prospect of “conversion” therapy offered more hope, more freedom to patients than psychoanalysis ever could. “The criticisms are based on old concepts,” Masters replied dismissively to the press. “We’re reporting on 10 years of work with five years of follow-up—and it works.”
But despite his claims, the success of Masters’s “gay conversion” therapy have never been proved.

It will be interesting to see if any of the patients involved step forward…

Another suicide related to bullying?

At least that is what the family and friends of Jaheem Herrera are saying. The story does not mention the anti-gay nature of the harassment but the mother says it in the interview. Sounds like there were multiple issues involved as well. I don’t know all the circumstances but an investigation needs to be conducted.
This is very sad.
What if Focus on the Family and Exodus partnered with GLSEN and PFLAG to issue a joint statement and/or campaign to teach kids that bullying for any reason is immoral? What if the Christian groups made a concerted effort to reach out to youth group leaders with the message that calling kids gay, etc. is harmful?
Can I get a witness?

Scott Lively on Columbine

Ten years ago today, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and a teacher, as well as wounding 23 others before killing themselves at Columbine High School near Denver, CO. Immediately and since then, mental health professionals, journalists and numerous others have searched through the writings of Harris and Klebold, and interviewed their classmates looking for the motives behind the shootings. Immediately after the tragedy, the media reported various theories based largely upon the accounts of classmates and acquaintances. Many of those theories have been discounted by later systematic investigations.
Scott Lively spoke recently to a Republican group in Temecula, CA and, as an aside, told the crowd his version of Columbine. While talking about the influence of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche on the Nazis, Lively tied Hitler, Nietzsche and homosexuality together as the culprit behind the Columbine shootings. At about 1:33 into Part 7 of his speech before the GOP group, Lively said,

They [the Nazis] had Hitler youth meetings around Nietzsche’s writings. You know the kids that killed, who was it, one of the school killers, one of the first ones. He was reading Thus Spake Zarathustra [by Nietzsche] when he committed those murders and he did it…didn’t he do it on Adolf Hitler’s birthday? April 20th, right? Yeah, the Columbine shooting, that was the same spirit that existed in Germany. It was Nietzsche’s writings, and it was Hitler’s birthday and it was associated with homosexuality. That was one of the first stories that came out, it got suppressed immediately that the guys that did this were involved in some kind of homosexual connection. That got squelched. As all this stuff gets squelched.


I asked Mr. Lively for a source for these claims and he had no exact reference, although he thought it might have come from a documentary he saw. I searched for any references connecting Klebold and/or Harris to Thus Spake Zarathustra but found nothing specific. Journals and writings of Eric Harris did have a very Nietzschean quality and according to Langman, Harris did a school report on Nietzsche. However, it is not clear to school violence expert, Dr. Peter Langman that Harris ever read Thus Spake Zarathustra. In his paper, “Influences on the Ideology of Eric Harris,” Dr. Langman said

This article explores the parallels between Eric Harris’s ideas and those of people he admired: Adolf Hitler, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Hobbes, and probably Charles Manson. We know that Hitler fascinated Eric from his choosing to write about him for a school research paper, the references to Hitler and the Nazis in Eric’s journal (along with swastikas and SS insignia), and the testimony of Eric’s friends that he idolized or worshipped Hitler.
We know nothing specific about Eric’s interest in Hobbes and Nietzsche. All we have is his statement, “I just love Hobbes and Nietzsche.” What he read of their works remains unknown. Eric did take a philosophy class at school that may have introduced him to Hobbes and Nietzsche. He may also have done significant reading on his own. Whether or not Eric had an accurate understanding of Hobbes and Nietzsche is not relevant here. Eric would have read these philosophers from his own perspective, perhaps already knowing that he would commit mass murder, and looking for justification or validation of his worldview and intentions.

In any event, I could find no evidence that Harris was reading it just before or when he was shooting his peers.
The homosexuality connection is even more tortured. It is true that very quickly after the shootings, some classmates noted that gay slurs had been made toward both Klebold and Harris. However, no credible source has found any verification of the hunch. Langman deals with this rumor in some detail:

More significantly, there were rumors that Eric and Dylan, along with members of the Trench Coat Mafia, were gay. When reporter Dave Cullen investigated this, however, he found that “the stories were generally vague, secondhand, and never from students who personally knew members of the group.”16 A student stated that Eric and Dylan “would touch each other in school. People have seen them. One of them went up to a kid I know and did that” (he demonstrated grabbing his crotch). When asked if that were Eric or Dylan, the student said, “I don’t know,” adding that it was “people in the group.” Thus, behavior that was engaged in by members of the Trench Coat Mafia was attributed to Eric and Dylan because they wore trench coats.
There are, in fact, reports in the JCSO material of Trench Coat Mafia members grabbing crotches in front of people, and of males kissing each other publicly, but none that Eric or Dylan engaged in such behavior. Just to add to the confusion, one of the boys in the Trench Coat Mafia who engaged in this provocative sexual behavior was named Eric. This may be the source of some of the confusion – there were two boys named Eric who wore trench coats. One of them engaged in public homosexual behavior. The other one – Eric Harris – did not.
The same student who was just quoted also said that the Trench Coat Mafia kids were made fun of, and lumped Eric and Dylan in with the TCM: “They [Eric and Dylan] were in the Trench Coat Mafia, and that’s something around our school that we consider freaks.” He said that as a result, Eric and Dylan were picked on. Yet, Eric and Dylan were not in the Trench Coat Mafia, and this student could not talk about them apart from that identification. He said Eric and Dylan were gay and that they were picked on for being in the TCM, but when pushed on the issue, could not be sure he even knew which kids he was talking about.
Similarly, Time Magazine reported the following:

“Columbine is a clean, good place except for those rejects,” Todd says of Klebold and Harris and their friends. “Most kids didn’t want them there. They were into witchcraft. They were into voodoo dolls. Sure, we teased them. But what do you expect with kids who come to school with weird hairdos and horns on their hats? … They’re a bunch of homos, grabbing each other’s private parts. If you want to get rid of someone, usually you tease ’em. So the whole school would call them homos.”19

This passage could easily be used to support the idea that Eric and Dylan were persecuted, but that would be a mistake. Who is this student talking about? The reporters’ comment says he was talking about “Klebold and Harris and their friends,” but nothing that the student said applied to Eric and Dylan. They were not into witchcraft. They were not into voodoo. They did not have weird hairdos. They did not wear horns on their hats. They did not grab each other’s crotches. There were kids at Columbine who did these things, but Eric and Dylan were not among them. Thus, we again see a student apparently talking about Eric and Dylan, but confusing them with all the students who were considered misfits, outcasts, or members of the Trench Coat Mafia.

I reproduced that long section because the context is necessary to understand why the hypothetical connection of homosexuality (or the spirit of it) to the Columbine tragedy is spurious. There is also doubt about the relevance of Hitler’s birthday; April 19th may have been the original date. Nietzsche’s sexuality is in doubt as well. However, even if every component of the conspiracy theory about Klebold and Harris was accurate, it would not prove that they were linked in some manner.
In any case, there is no credible evidence that either Harris or Klebold were homosexual. The best evidence points to mental illness being behind the violence at Columbine. The stories about homosexuality have been squelched, not because they would betray a dark secret about homosexuality and fascism, but because investigation finds no basis for them.