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Homosexuality was a mental illness until 1973

The vote that changed it was decided by evidence nobody had asked for.

Homosexuality was a mental illness until 1973

It sat in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual as a sociopathic personality disturbance. The research that undid it was done in the 1950s by psychologist Evelyn Hooker, who gave personality tests to matched groups of homosexual and heterosexual men and asked expert judges to identify which was which. The judges could not do better than chance.

The APA removed it in 1973. The World Health Organization did not follow until 1990 — on 17 May, a date now marked annually. Denmark had decriminalised in 1933, but removed it as a diagnosis only in 1981.

Sources

Hooker, Journal of Projective Techniques (1957); APA (1973); WHO (1990)

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General information, not medical advice. Anything persistent or painful belongs with a doctor, who has heard it before.