Posted on 02/07/2023 1:56:52 PM PST by Ennis85
Charles Silverstein, a psychologist who helped achieve one of the most significant victories of the gay rights movement by persuading the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness, died Jan. 30 at his home in New York City. He was 87.
He had lung cancer, said his executor, Aron Berlinger.
Dr. Silverstein spent decades of his life — as an activist, a psychologist and an author — advancing the cause of gay rights. He had felt the sting of discrimination and the burden of shame as a gay man who came of age at a time when expressions of homosexuality were stigmatized if not outright illegal, and when gay people were treated not only as morally deviant but as mentally ill.
Dr. Silverstein, who felt he had no choice but to conceal his sexuality during his early professional years and into graduate school, came out as the gay rights movement gained momentum in the wake of the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969.
He was nearing completion of a doctoral degree in social psychology and had joined the Gay Activists Alliance, an advocacy group that organized high-profile protests known as “zaps,” when he was invited to speak to the APA’s nomenclature committee on the matter of homosexuality.
At the time, homosexuality was categorized as a mental disorder and “sexual deviation” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a reference volume regarded as the authoritative guide to mental health diagnoses. In February 1973, Dr. Silverstein was one of several speakers who appeared before the nomenclature panel to challenge the scientific and clinical basis of that classification.
“Psychoanalysts believed that gay men were doomed to lives of depression and, eventually, suicide because of their shame,” Dr. Silverstein later told the Windy City Times,
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
So the male with a mental illness got his mental illness declassified as a mental illness. And look at where we are today.
Leftist politics over sound science. And we’ve been paying for it 50 years since.
I’m a male lesbian
May he rot in hell for his role in getting governments to pretend that homosexuality is normal.
He was famous for getting a mental illness re-classified as normal behavior. Well, since it is still a mental illness (and even worse) can we start adding up all the harm his “accomplishment” did?
Of course we can’t. The damage approaches infinity.
He died from the injection?
Now he can argue about it with God, during his trial.
>>Sickhologists have the same success rate with patients as witch doctors. Not a joke.<<
Way back in the 60’s, John W Campbell wrote an editorial in Analog siting a study of mental health ‘cure’ rates.
Cooperating South American witch doctors ‘success rates’; American Psychiatric Association stats; and stats on “spontaneous remission without treatment” of involuntarily committed patients were compared.
The witch doctors & psychs tied, with a dismal ‘success’ rate, well below 50%; but were beaten unequivocally by the reported ‘spontaneous remission’ rates, also below 50%.
I make no claims as to the validity of the actual study, but I definitely remember LMBO when I read the editorial.
Did he help more people or harm more people?
Ive read that too: before psychiatrists began drugging and shocking people the more wealthy would send loopy family members to sanitariums where they were simply allowed to rest and weave baskets, etc. Some 70% returned to normal life. Apparently the most effective treatment for people who have become overwhelmed by life is kindness, not brain butchering or drugging.
May Charles Silverstein enjoy his forever roasting in Hell. We are much better off without him.
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