Everything You Knew is Wrong

I moved to this city twenty-five months ago, but I still haven’t managed to find myself a psychiatrist. I have been treated for depression and dysthymia for a half-dozen years now, and lacking first comprehensive, then any health insurance, whatever traditional psychotherapy I sought would have to be paid for out of pocket. As a full-time student and part-time library paraprofessional, there’s not much in my pockets, so I have to make do with what resources I can cobble together.

I saw a resident at the medical school for a while, and consulted with my former psychiatrist over the phone while I was in transition from one place to another. Phone consultations are hard, and at the sliding-scale clinic I had serious doubts about the competence of my resident, as well as disgust at the unprofessional behavior of the reception staff. I found a combination of medications that keeps me relatively stable and content, and I have a GP prescribing them to me as a stopgap situation until I can set myself up with a competent specialist who is willing to see a patient who pays out-of-pocket.

That’s a gloss of my background info. One of these weeks I’ll write more about mental illness, despair, and lack of faith.

Someone on a message board mentioned catholictherapists.com, which piqued my interest–it might be nice for once to see a mental health professional who doesn’t see my geriatric (past age 20) virginity as a serious crisis to be remedied as soon as possible. There was one listed in my city, whose office I drive past every day on my way to work. Looking over her profile, I saw something that stuck in the back of my mind. The site asks applicants to state and comment on which official Church teachings they agree or disagree with. Catholic personals sites do the same thing, of course–all for reasons that should be self-evident. You can see the application here: it asks about artificial contraception, abortion, infertility, cohabitation…the everyday issues that most mainstream American Catholics ignore.

The local shrink agreed with the last item. The Church’s teaching on homosexuality.

Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.

This is a valid teaching, even if it’s one that I disagree with, and I understand why they include it…but then, I don’t. I understand that there are still conservative physicians and therapists who believe that homosexuality is a psychiatric illness in need of treatment or who call for chastity and conquering one’s urges. Fine. To say that being homosexual is “disordered” implies that it is a mental illness…which it hasn’t been considered such by her profession since 1972.

Pharmacists and hospitals have a right not to stock or dispense Plan B. Here in New York, you can have a special testing time for civil service exams if they happen to fall on a religious holiday or day of rest. I oppose on ethical grounds the policy of my profession (librarian) that all patrons, even minors, should have access to all materials in the library.

It’s one thing to gracefully bow out of doing things at work that one’s religion forbids, but publicly declaring disagreement with the profession’s definition of what constitutes a mental illness? I can see the reasoning behind it, but I’m not sure I would want to be a patient of a doctor who clicked the little ticky box in complete sincerity.