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Robert Spitzer, "the most influential psychiatrist," dies at 83

SEATTLE - Dr. Robert Spitzer - a psychiatrist who played a leading role in establishing agreed-upon standards to describe mental disorders and eliminating homosexuality's designation as a pathology - died Friday in Seattle. He was 83.


Dr. Spitzer's work on several editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the D.S.M., defined all of the major disorders "so all in the profession could agree on what they were seeing," said Williams, who worked with him on D.S.M.-III, which was published in 1980 and became a best-selling book.

"That was a major breakthrough in the profession," she said.


"Rather than just appealing to authority, the authority of Freud, the appeal was: Are there studies? What evidence is there?" Spitzer told the New Yorker magazine in 2005. "The people I appointed had all made a commitment to be guided by data."



At the time of the psychiatric profession's debate over homosexuality, Dr. Spitzer told the Washington Post: "A medical disorder either had to be associated with subjective distress - pain - or general impairment in social function."


In 2012, Dr. Spitzer publicly apologized for a 2001 study that found so-called reparative therapy on gay people can turn them straight if they really want to do so. He told the Times in 2012 that he concluded the study was flawed because it simply asked people who had gone through reparative therapy if they had changed their sexual orientation.

"As I read these commentaries (about the study,) I knew this was a problem, a big problem, and one I couldn't answer," Dr. Spitzer told the Times. "How do you know someone has really changed?"

Dr. Spitzer and his wife moved to Seattle from New Jersey this year.

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