This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Stanley E. Harris, MD
University of Southern California Los Angeles

JAMA. 1988;259(22):3271.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—The Nov 13,1987, issue of JAMA contains a COUNCIL REPORT¹ that presents views of the scientific literature as of February 1987. One of the views, that "treatment for homosexuality is appropriate only when a patient is uncomfortable with his or her sexual orientation," was based on the DSM-III disorder ego-dystonic homosexuality.² This diagnosis was used by some clinicians to justify providing aversion therapy to change the sexual orientation of patients who were distressed by their homosexuality.

In May 1987, the American Psychiatric Association removed the diagnosis of ego-dystonic homosexuality from the revised edition of DSM-III because there is no scientific basis for diagnosing homosexuality as a disorder. Now, a patient distressed about sexual orientation, whether heterosexual, bisexual, or homosexual, may be diagnosed as "sexual disorder not otherwise specified."³

The disorder is the distress, not the sexual orientation, and treatment should be aimed at relieving . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?