from Events/Announcements

NARTH Opening Address, October 27, 2007

A. Dean Byrd, Ph.D., MBA, MPH
NARTH President

NARTH has had a good year, and as I noted in my remarks last year, we have reached the mainstream. NARTH professionals and supporters can be found everywhere, and in every mental-health discipline. The positive results of our efforts are readily observable in the current dialogue. This is the same NARTH collective voice that just a few years ago, seemed but little more than a lone voice in a vast wilderness. But things have changed, and are changing even more in a positive direction.

Attempts to silence NARTH have failed because we have been able to respond to misinformation with good science and demonstrable clinical experience.

We support the freedom of individuals with unwanted homosexual attractions to seek safe, effective psychological care, and we defend the right of mental-health professionals to provide that care. Individuals certainly have the freedom either to claim a gay identity, or to pursue a path of change. Regardless of what choice the person makes, we must always demonstrate respect for human dignity.

The Governing Board of NARTH has accepted the Leona Tyler Principle which was articulated by a former president of the American Psychological Association. That is, in taking public stands, making public statements or otherwise engaging in advocacy, NARTH must always rely on scientific data and demonstrable professional experience. Absent such validation, NARTH members are free to speak as any concerned citizen--either individually, or collectively through advocacy organizations.

We must always respect and support client autonomy, self-determination and diversity. Unlike many of the national mental-health organizations, we must never allow activism to masquerade as science. Neither should we allow such masquerading by other organizations to go uncritically examined.

Additional evidence that NARTH has entered the mainstream is found in the pages of Mother Jones, a popular magazine. The title in a recent edition of the magazine conveys an interesting message: "Gay by Choice? The Science of Sexual Identity." A subtitle asks "If science proves that sexual orientation is more fluid than we've been led to believe, can homosexuality still be a protected right?" Somewhere in this interesting series of statements lies the truth: Sexual orientation is more fluid than we have been led to believe.

In a very recent book (2007) titled, The Community Mental Health System, by Teed, Scileppi, Boeckmann, Crispi, Regan and Whitehouse (published by Pearson), the authors include a most interesting summary statement. Listen carefully to what they write:

"Currently, the power to declare a behavior indicative of mental illness is held by members of the American Psychiatric Association, who voted, for example, to no longer consider homosexuality a mental disorder. These decisions typically are based not on research, but on the mental health professionals' perception of cultural norms [emphasis added] and tolerance for behavioral diversity."

In other words, political correctness, not science, determines what is a mental disorder and what is not?

Dr. Gary Greenberg, author of the Mother Jones article, attended the NARTH conference last year and was apparently a participant in my day-long training. Although his journalistic license revealed some of his biases in several places in the Mother Jones article, his professional integrity seemed to overshadow most of those biases.

Consider some of the quotes from Dr. Greenberg's article.

1. Regarding the biological argument, Dr. Greenberg notes, "...the evidence so far stops well short of proving that we are born with a sexual orientation that we will have for life...even more important, some research shows that sexual orientation is more fluid than we have come to think." He even cites some of the gay activists and gay researchers whose commentaries and studies support NARTH's positions.
2. Dr. Greenberg focuses on this fluidity, noting that there are both some "ex-gays and ex-straights."
3. He notes that if NARTH professionals are successful in advocating for the right of self-determination in matters of sexual orientation, gay activists may soon find themselves scrambling to make sense of a new scientific and political landscape.
4. I guess that I had forgotten (if I ever knew, and assuming that Dr. Greenberg is correct) that when the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the diagnostic manual, that the membership did so by a 6-point margin. I think that he may have meant a 6 percent margin, but what is important about that statement is that "it was the first time in history that a condition was eliminated by a stroke of a pen."
5. Interesting enough, Dr. Greenberg did not find NARTH members to be all that unusual. In fact, we are not "spewing nearly as much hellfire and brimstone" as he had expected. Indeed, he did not find the conference to be all that different from other conferences, with their "bad coffee, worse Danish and dry-as-dust lectures." To the contrary, he acknowledged NARTH's scientific seriousness and our modulated approach, including our workman-like review of the literature.

Finally, the recent symposium that I chaired at the American Psychological Association's annual convention, provides additional support for NARTH. Titled "Reforming APA Advocacy," the symposium sounded a loud and clear message that APA needs to re-think the political agendas that control the resolutions and position statements that they produce. Former APA Presidents Cummings and Farley along with Wright, a former member of APA's Board of Directors, expressed grave concerns about the persistent ideological bias in APA and the demoralization of the APA membership.

Though the symposium was relegated to a Monday-morning slot (which I am told is a way for APA to hide or diminish the influence of those presentations for which they have little fondness), the attendance at this symposium was spectacular. The room was filled as these APA leaders talked of APA's "abuse of its public stature in the interest of advancing controversial social and/or political goals," and the "fecklessness" of APA's recent leadership.

What was clear from this symposium is that APA members are becoming disenchanted with their national organization and are growing weary of special-interest groups within the national organization whose political agendas trump science. And we see the beginning of a demand for a more democratic form of governance.

There is no better time for NARTH than now. NARTH leaders want to ensure that those with unwanted homosexual attractions have access to safe, effective psychological care, and that the rights of therapists to provide that care are also protected. Patient autonomy, patient self-determination and respect for worldview diversity demand that much.