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Gays 'taught' to be straight
07/10/2003 21:12 - (SA)
Natasha Pamplin , Beeld
Natasha Pamplin
London - An American psychiatrist claims that psychotherapy can turn homosexual people into heterosexuals.
Professor Robert Spitzer conducted a study treating 200 homosexual men and women, where 78% of the men and 95% of the women allegedly changed their sexual orientation.
Spitzer is the psychiatrist who had homosexuality removed from the American Psychiatric Association's list of mental illnesses in 1973.
He claims that the study is valid. He said the treatment was developed to give gay people, who were uncomfortable with their sexual orientation, the right to treatment.
The "rehabilitation treatment" involved "self control" techniques such as putting in more effort to mix with heterosexual people in non-sexual circumstances and to avoid "temptation".
Spitzer and his team from the University of Colombia in New York found that most of the participants partly or fully became heterosexual.
Gay-rights groups criticised the study and made it off as nonsense. They argued that the study fuelled the debate that homosexuality is an illness.
- Beeld
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South Africa
