To hear government experts on the witness stand in civil detention trials in recent months, the novel diagnosis of "hebephilia" was a fait accompli, just awaiting its formal acceptance into the upcoming fifth edition of the influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
They were flat-out wrong.
In a stunning blow to psychology's burgeoning sex offender processing industry, the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association rejected the proposed diagnosis outright, not even relegating it to an appendix as meriting further study, its proponents' fall-back position.
The rejection follows the failure of two other sexual disorders proposed by the DSM-5's paraphilias subworkgroup. These were paraphilic coercive disorder (or a proclivity toward rape) and hypersexuality, an inherently hard-to-define construct that introduced the committee members' value judgments as to how much sex is within acceptable limits.
After abandoning those two disorders, the subworkgroup clung tenaciously to a whittled-down version of its proposed expansion of pedophilia to cover sexual attraction to early pubescent youngsters (generally in the age range of 11-14), ignoring widespread opposition from both within and outside of the APA.
The buzz is that senior psychiatrists in the APA were unhappy with the intransigence of psychologists in the subworkgroup who communicated the belief that if they just stuck to their guns, they could force the ill-considered proposal into the new manual, despite a lack of scientific support. ...continued... by In The News
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