[4] Spitzer wrote an article on Wilhelm Reich's theories in 1953 which the American Journal of Psychiatry declined to publish.
[8] The Lancet's obituary described him as "Stubborn, sometimes abrasive, and always eager, Spitzer's work was guided by a strong sense of ethical fairness".
They found the most important difference between countries was that the concept of schizophrenia used in New York was much broader than the one used in London, and included patients who would have been termed manic-depressive or bipolar.
[12][13] In 1974, Spitzer became the chair of the American Psychiatric Association's task force of the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the so-called DSM-III, which was released in 1980.
The authors rejected calls to adopt the ICD-9 because it lacked diagnostic criteria and would "[set] psychiatry back 30 years," while the ICD-10, closely resembled the DSM-III-R classification.
[14] In 2013, a definitive autobiography of Spitzer, The Making of DSM-III: A Diagnostic Manual's Conquest of American Psychiatry, was published by author and historian Hannah S. Decker.
Spitzer was briefly featured in the 2007 BBC TV series The Trap, in which he stated that the DSM, by operationalizing the definitions of mental disorders while paying little attention to the context in which the symptoms occur, may have medicalized the normal human experiences of a significant number of people.
at the 2001 annual APA meeting; he argued that it is possible that some highly motivated individuals could successfully change their sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual.
[20] A Washington Post article indicated that Spitzer held 45-minute telephone interviews with 200 people who claimed that their respective sexual orientations had changed from homosexual to heterosexual.
[22][23] The APA issued an official disavowal of Spitzer's paper, noting that it had not been peer-reviewed and stating, "There is no published scientific evidence supporting the efficacy of reparative therapy as a treatment to change one's sexual orientation.
[27] In a 2012 interview, Spitzer said he asked to retract the study and stated that he agreed with its critics: "In retrospect, I have to admit I think the critiques are largely correct," he said.
)In a letter to Kenneth J Zucker, editor of Journal of Sexual Behavior, Spitzer wrote: Several months ago I told you that because of my revised view of my 2001 study of reparative therapy changing sexual orientation, I was considering writing something that would acknowledge that I now judged the major critiques of the study as largely correct.
I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy.
[29]Spitzer received the Thomas William Salmon Medal from the New York Academy of Medicine for his contributions to psychiatry.