Dr Willem Lemmens, who is a bioethicist, spoke out last weekend after a symposium which looked at the ethics surrounding suicide and euthanasia, psychiatry and mental health care.

"In just a few years, requests for euthanasia in psychiatry [have] became more and more ‘acceptable' and common in Belgium," he said after the Oxford-based symposium.

He says euthanasia requests are made despite the fact that even pro-euthanasia doctors say "the law was intended for somatic terminal diseases, not mental suffering caused by psychiatric diseases."

"So, the moral climate has changed drastically, in the sense that euthanasia is called by some a ‘fundamental right' and death a ‘therapeutic solution.'"

Pro-life advocates should raise their voices "in a dignified manner and listen to the critical testimonies and voices in Belgium and the Netherlands," he suggests.

Lemmens says legalised euthanasia is affecting the field of psychiatry. Psychiatrists are often put under pressure to ‘grant' euthanasia, sometimes even by the family of a patient.

"Some psychiatrists - clearly a minority - think they should at all costs respect the autonomy of the patient."

He says they are prepared to do this, "even though they acknowledge the subjective dimension of a euthanasia request for mental suffering only and also the difficulty to determine that there are no treatment options left.

"All this has created a sphere of mutual distrust among psychiatrists, also because worrisome cases were revealed in the press about which some want to keep silent."

Lemmens says "worrisome cases" include testimonies by families who say loved ones suffering from mental disorders "have been given euthanasia without their consent or against the advice of certain physicians."

Source

• Crux
• LifeSite
• Image: YouTube

As early as 1977, Dr Dominian warned against what he called the Catholic Church's pre-occupation with marital chastity at the expense of other factors in a successful marriage.

In his "Proposals for a New Sexual Ethic", he argued that the presence of a genuine love between two people - whether they be married or not - validates sex, making it an activity worthy of celebration.

Sexual pleasure, he wrote, must not be trivialised in the eyes of the Church, being one of the "gifts of God to man which can become the springs of joy, pleasure and loving communication".

Dr Dominian went on to extend the argument in defence of the love between same-sex couples.

To think of sex solely in terms of procreation, he wrote in New Internationalist in 1986, was to deny its "capacity to give life in a more than biological sense", its role in strengthening a couple's sexual identity and their sense of commitment to each other.

While Dr Dominian admitted that the teachings of the Bible condemned homosexual practices, he ventured that same-sex marriages would one day be possible, and that couples should receive the support of Church and state.

In all, he published more than 30 books, including "The Definitive Guide to What Makes a Marriage Work" (1995), and "One Like Us: A Psychological Interpretation of Jesus" (1998), which employed modern psychoanalytic theories to explore Christ's childhood development.

In the latter, Dr Dominian argued that Mary's nurturing in the early years enabled Jesus to develop the emotional maturity to be fully human and fully divine.

It was part of Jesus' "psychological genius" that he could handle both natures without becoming a split personality, Dr Dominian theorised.

He also wrote that Jesus was "capable of appreciating female beauty and being aroused by it" and was "no prude".

But Jesus came to give himself to the whole world, not to an exclusive person, he wrote.

Dr Dominian decided to write "One Like Us" because "Christianity is wrapped up in theological terms which are meaningless to the contemporary world".

Dr Dominian became critical of the Church's teaching on sexuality, its hierarchical structure and "the gap between the institutional reality and the community of love Jesus set up".

Sources

• The Telegraph
• The Independent
• Image: The Telegraph

Psychiatric diagnoses have always been difficult and unreliable. This is one of the major reasons why illnesses seem to come and go. It was said that the best way to cure schizophrenics in America in the 1960s was to move them to England, where they would be considered merely ‘eccentric'. And it remains true that schizophrenia is still diagnosed less frequently in the UK than in the US. America has always dominated the psychiatric world.

Americans might not be too eager to accept that mental illness could be culturally determined, but in the UK we have tended to import their illness in much the same as we have embraced their taste in personal injury lawyers, sitcoms and diet. In the US, someone might be regarded as socially unskilled, unassertive and emotionally repressed; in Japan, the exact same behaviour might be considered simply demure or polite.

Psychiatrists have a tendency to colonise and pathologise behaviour patterns. New syndromes appear, the diagnostic manuals grow larger with each new edition. Naughty children now have attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder or adolescent defiant disorder. All sorts of behaviour previously thought of as selfish, immoral, even shameful, now gets nicely medicalised with a label that can be seen to excuse it. And soon there will be pharmaceutical companies with appropriate drugs to cure these new illnesses. Continue reading

Sources

• Aeon Magazine
• Image: You Tube