don’t understand the question
what makes you think CAtholics attach some kind of stigma to anyone afflicted with an illness? there is certainly nothing in Catholic teaching that would justify such an attitude.
by “brain disease” do you mean mental illness or personality disorder? Why do you blame societal means of treating such illnesses on Catholics specifically? Why is it wrong to send an ill person to a place where they will be treated?
No, nothing in the teachings of Christ would even lend remote legitimacy to stigmatizing anyone, save perhaps someone who publicly teaches sin and therefore gets excommunicated as such from the Church.
To answer your other questions, yes, I do mean mental illness or personality disorder, but I do not blame ‘societal’ means of treating such illnesses on we Catholics in particular: however, in this region of the NY state, treatment is dominated by a philosophy of primarily atheist Freudian-ism, and likewise “hollow organism” behaviorism. Thus, to send someone to ’ a place where they will be treated’ is tantamount to socially sanctioned persecution of their beliefs (should that person be Catholic).
In asking whether or not the theology is impudent, I was using irony and advertising to get the attention of social justice experts such as can be found in such a venue as this website. Mine was a challenge to develop a Catholic model of treatment that rivals the ridiculously persecuting-, ostracizing-, and coercive-type methods of treatment that have grown and taken root in the mental health clinics of myth or reality in NY. If we cannot, then we are stigmatizing our mentally ill, who are told routinely that m-sturb-tion, out of wedlock sex and other forms of immoral behavior are OK because you have a mental illness and no one will want to enter into ‘a long term sexual relationship’ with you–guilty in that we have not challenged psychiatry on this point, guilty in that we then don;t want to shake hands with these folks because they are, in a most twisted, ironic sense, our problem children with a dispensation to sin that only puts them further in harm and makes them second class members of their parish, though much heralded as active and important. It is making their private suffering a thing of encouragement to others. An unnecessary, additional cross hoisted on them without conscious knowledge on either their or our part. We too quickly defer to so-called psychological experts and entrust them with our people. Common sense tells me we all should eschew anything so simple and quick a fix as “supportive psychotherapy”.
Finally, there was several years back an article in the New Yorker Magazine on how the scandal on the American Church was caused by relegating and deferring to psychiatry the personal problems of the clergy, which could have been handled by frank and open discussion in parishes as to the nature of temptation and the need for people to begin again covering themselves up in mass.
We have hired help to clean the house, and it has been set fire by the help. We all ought to pray that psychiatry has good intentions toward the church, because it is a social force growing in power as we speak, and one not always congenial to our morality and goals of life in the spirit.
When it is congenial in the case of specific doctors, their price is almost always prohibitive of the average mentally ill person. The hard core schizophrenics, who “don’t matter anyhow” are on backwards in institutions in the community or in the large centers.
