The fall 2012 issue of Dialogue features a 21 page article from Elon Karten Ph.D a practicing psychologist who deals with many frum people struggling with this problem.
In the article he documents that the “taskforce” that condemned “reparative therapy” consisted of individuals who were on record about their positions before the selection while those who were more neutral were turned away.
the six member board consisted of
Judith M Glasgold- Board member of the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Psychotherapy.
Jack Drescher- well know gay activist.
Lee Beckstead- Self identified gay man.
Beverly Green- Co-editor of APA Gay and Lesbian Division 44 series on Psychological Perspectives on Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Issues.
Robin Lin Miller- worked for Gay Men’s Health Crisis.
Roger Worthington- Chief Diversity Officer and University of Missouri and recipient of the 2001 Catalyst award from the LGBT Resource Center.
This is the “neutral board that “investigated” reparative therapy and then condemned it as harmful.
In the article he further notes that the study by Dr. Robert Spitzer actually did find that sexual conversion therapy does in fact work and that study was consistent with an earlier study by MacIntosh in 1994.
Yes Dr. Spitzer did come under harsh criticism from the gay community and yes the APA did distance itself from his work however when approached the editor of the Journal that originally published the article Dr. Kenneth Zucker Ph.D, to ask to issue a retraction he replied
“You can retract data incorrectly analyzed, to do that you publish an erratum. You can retract an article of the data was falsified-or the journal retracts it if the editor knows it. As I understand it he’s just saying ten years later that he wants to retract his interpretation of the data. Well we’d probably have to retract hundreds of scientific papers with regard to interpretation, and we don’t do that”.
I would encourage the posters who state that there is no proof that therapy can work in these cases to read the entire article which is full sourced.