I-RIGHT-I
09-10-2003, 10:06 PM
American Psychiatric Association Symposium Debates Whether Pedophilia, Gender-Identity Disorder, Sexual Sadism Should Remain Mental Illnesses
By Linda Ames Nicolosi
On Monday, May 19th, 2003 in San Francisco, at a symposium hosted by the American Psychiatric Association, several long-recognized categories of mental illness were discussed for possible removal from the upcoming edition of the psychiatric manual of mental disorders.
Among the mental illnesses being debated in the symposium at the APA's annual convention were all the paraphilias--which include pedophilia, exhibitionism, fetishism, transvestism, voyeurism, and sadomasochism.
Also being debated was gender-identity disorder, a condition in which a person feels persistent discomfort with his or her biological sex. Gay activists have long claimed that gender-identity disorder should not be assumed to be abnormal, when, they say, it is usually an expression of healthy prehomosexuality.
Dr Robert Spitzer responded to the symposium as a discussant, urging that the paraphilias and gender-identity disorder be retained in the psychiatric manual.
Disagreeing, Psychiatrist Charles Moser of San Francisco's Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality and co-author Peggy Kleinplatz of the University of Ottawa presented a paper entitled, "DSM-IV-TR and the Paraphilias: An Argument for Removal." They argued that people whose sexual interests are atypical, culturally forbidden, or religiously proscribed should not, for those reasons, be labeled mentally ill.
MORE (http://www.narth.com/docs/symposium.html)
By Linda Ames Nicolosi
On Monday, May 19th, 2003 in San Francisco, at a symposium hosted by the American Psychiatric Association, several long-recognized categories of mental illness were discussed for possible removal from the upcoming edition of the psychiatric manual of mental disorders.
Among the mental illnesses being debated in the symposium at the APA's annual convention were all the paraphilias--which include pedophilia, exhibitionism, fetishism, transvestism, voyeurism, and sadomasochism.
Also being debated was gender-identity disorder, a condition in which a person feels persistent discomfort with his or her biological sex. Gay activists have long claimed that gender-identity disorder should not be assumed to be abnormal, when, they say, it is usually an expression of healthy prehomosexuality.
Dr Robert Spitzer responded to the symposium as a discussant, urging that the paraphilias and gender-identity disorder be retained in the psychiatric manual.
Disagreeing, Psychiatrist Charles Moser of San Francisco's Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality and co-author Peggy Kleinplatz of the University of Ottawa presented a paper entitled, "DSM-IV-TR and the Paraphilias: An Argument for Removal." They argued that people whose sexual interests are atypical, culturally forbidden, or religiously proscribed should not, for those reasons, be labeled mentally ill.
MORE (http://www.narth.com/docs/symposium.html)