It's not you. It's us.
The American Psychoanalytic Association has apologized for its damaging past views that LGBTQ people were abnormal and unhealthy.
The long-overdue recognition took place Friday, at the start of the organization's 109th annual meeting in San Diego. It coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.
In 1969, when the patrons of the Stonewall Inn revolted against the constant persecution they faced for their gender identity or sexual orientation, the mental health field was firm in its position that anything that stirred away from the heterosexual binary world was a sickness.
The idea that being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer was not only unnatural, but also morally and psychologically wrong, contributed to widespread discrimination, whose effects still reverberate today.
It also led to the cruel and dangerous notion that homosexuality or gender non-conforming identities are conditions that can be "cured."
A survey of 35,000 LGBTQ youth released by the Trevor Project earlier this month showed that 42% respondents who underwent conversion therapy in the last year reported a suicide attempt; 57% of transgender and non-binary youth did the same.
Writing for Psychology Today, the New York-based psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jack Drescher, said that, if an LGBTQ person looked for psychoanalyst in 1969, he/she/they "would very likely have been offered now-discredited conversion therapy."
A few years after the Stonewall uprising, in December 1973, the American Psychiatric Association had issued a resolution stating that homosexuality was not a mental illness or sickness. That decision was strongly rejected by the psychoanalytic community, said Drescher, who's co-chair of the Committee on Public Information of the APA.
"In the two decades that followed, meetings and journals of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) continued presenting and writing about homosexuality as a mental disorder," Drescher wrote. "The organization also refused to allow openly gay and lesbian mental health professionals to train at affiliated centers."
The organization's hateful stance started changing in 1991, after a threat of an anti-discrimination lawsuit.
By the end of the '90s, Drescher continued, "APsaA has gone on to take positions supporting LGBTQ military service, against conversion therapy, ending sexuality-based bullying and harassment, and endorsing marriage equality."
"Regrettably some of that era's understanding of homosexuality and gender identity can be attributed to the American psychoanalytic establishment," Lee Jaffe, president of APsaA, said in a statement. "It is long past time to recognize and apologize for our role in the discrimination and trauma caused by our profession."
"While APsaA is now proud to be advocating for sexual and gender diversity, we all know that hearing the words 'we are sorry' is important to healing past trauma," he said.
The APsaA is the nation's oldest psychoanalytic organization, and it has approximately 3,300 members.
