Psychiatrist: Time to drop “silly” hebephilia once and for all

"Striking new evidence" should place the nail in the coffin of a "poorly conceived" proposal to turn sexual attraction to pubescent minors into a new mental disorder, says the chair of the DSM-IV Task Force in a new blog post at Psychology Today.

Allen Frances, professor emeritus at Duke University, has vocally opposed efforts to expand psychiatric diagnoses in the upcoming edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), due out in 2013.

In the wake of the DSM leadership's recent abandonment of a controversial new diagnosis for rapists, Frances says it is also past time to relegate "hebephilia" to "the obscurity it has so long and so justly deserved":

'Hebephilia' is a medical-sounding term for what is a purely legal issue--the statutory rape of pubescent youngsters aged 11-14. This is a crime deserving punishment, not a mental disorder deserving psychiatric hospitalization…. The 'hebephilia' proposal was always a poorly thought out, obvious non-starter. It failed on conceptual grounds, was unsupported by scientific evidence, and would create disastrous forensic problems. 

Four strikes and you're out

Frances lists four “strikes” against the proposal. In the first place, he points out, attraction to pubescent teenagers is biologically “hard-wired,” not deviant. Second, the research literature is “pathetically thin, methodologically flawed, and mostly completely irrelevant to whether it should be considered a mental disorder.” Third, the construct is a “forensic nightmare” that is already being abused in Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) civil commitment proceedings.

Lastly, Frances lambasts the claim that the number of sex crimes an individual has committed can be the basis for an accurate diagnosis. According to Frances, an independent data analysis just accepted for publication by Behavioral Sciences and the Law debunks that assertion. The article, by Richard Wollert and Elliot Cramer (online HERE), delivers "a piercing nail to seal the coffin" on hebephilia, writes Frances:

Reanalyzing the original raw data with appropriate statistical methods, they found that (contrary to the original report) there was an extremely high false positive rate in identifying 'hebephilia.' This had been obscured by an obvious statistical error in the original analysis--the highly selective sampling of subjects at the poles of the continuum, arbitrarily excluding those in the middle.

Frances’s full essay, at his Psychology Today blog DSM in Distress, is HERE.