Homosexuality considered a mental disorder until 1973

(centuries of religiously inspired xenophobia) + (a combination of silly Freudian psychoanalytical, dogmatic behaviorist, and cognitive psychological theories on homosexuality) = An ingrained culture of heterosexism and homophobia, which the progressive-minded of society are currently working to eliminate, one step at a time

 

/thread

 

I probably have many mental disorders - being gay is NOT one of them.

 

Homosexuality is not a mental disorder. It's something you're born with.

 

I've studied a good deal of history of psychology at my college, so I know a little bit aobut the background for this one.

One thing that I found interesting is that, very arguably, it was perfectly logical to call homosexuality a mental disorder until a few decades ago, and possibly even continues to be so in some places now.

'How can this be?' you might ask? Well, there's something called the "medical model of mental illness" that psychiatrists use as a foundation for diagnosing mental illness, which basically says an anomaly in a person is "disordered" inasmuch as it is sufficiently "maladaptive" (essentially bad for, or making adaptationg to life harder for) for that person. Notice that this implies nothing about the moral status of the "disorder," or even that it can conceivably be "cured," only that it has negative consequences for the subject in question. Obviously lots of psychiatrists in charge of making these decisions had bad motives for calling homosexuality a "disorder," but there were at least a few out there that argued it was a more or less uncurable disorder because of the negative social repercussions that being gay had at that time.

I'd like to point out that I think the medical model has lots of problems, and probably shouldn't be used any more (thus the scare-quotes around "disorder"), partly just because its so misleading. Since this was sort of the standard to go by at the moment though, this was a pretty logical consequence of it.

 

The two aren't mutually exclusive. Plenty of people are born with mental disorders. Homosexuality isn't one because it isn't a disordered behavior.

 

I'm not sure if people are born homosexual. But I also don't believe it is chosen or that it can be changed without causing harm to the individual.

 

The thing is, as others have said, that homosexuality was considered a disease to the homophobic majority at the time the DSM was stipulated.
Studies that 'proved' homosexuality to be an illness have all been found to be working from the preferred conclusion, not the evidence. But most importantly there is no evidence for homosexuality having a pathology or be mentally and/or physically harmful.
tl:dr: Homophobia used to rule the DSM, people started doing actually research and concluded said homophobia to be unsupported.

 

My thought on the matter is that I always thought that everyone already knew it was once considered a mental disorder.

 

^This^ 2

 

homosexuality is not a mental disorder, but homophobia technically is. Irrational fears like homophobia kinda fall under the realms of paranoia and schizophrenia.