Bishop Marc Stenger of Troyes in north-central France expressed his doubts on Twitter shortly after two priests in other dioceses within the country took their own lives on August 21 and 23.

These were two very different situations.

In the first case, Father Jacques Amouzou of the Diocese of Langres had been accused, two years earlier, of inappropriate behaviour with a woman who was going to him for spiritual direction.

In the other case, Father Thierry Min of the Diocese of Metz, was a dynamic 50-year-old.

Bishop Stenger, who knew him well, said the priest was "very sociable, but felt too lonely where he was".

The fellow priests with whom he had gone hiking in July said they hadn't perceived anything which would have foreshadowed such a tragedy.

There are many reasons why priests fall into depression or malaise, including overwork, spiritual dryness and the disconnect between their idealistic view of the priesthood and daily reality.

Priests often suffer from feeling unappreciated, experience intimacy difficulties linked to celibacy and are afflicted by the negative image that sexual scandals have given to the priesthood.

No matter what the cause, most priests tend to deal with their unhappiness through silence and isolation. And this is sometimes deadly.

Powerless witnesses

"It gnawed at me, I shut myself off," says Father Raymond, a priest from Monts du Lyonnais who experienced burnout in 2015.

"I had a very friendly relationship with my parishioners, many of whom simply called me 'Raymond,' but I realized that they were not close friends. I felt more attuned to their problems than the other way around," he says.

The same goes for another priest, who went through a serious illness in 2016 and now feels that "the trap for a priest is to give more than he receives".

It is difficult to know whether this is due to the attitude of the laity, the position of the priest in general or the temperament of a few.

"I tried to help him, but he had a strong personality and didn't like to be taken care of," says Marie (not her real name), who a few years ago was the "helpless" witness of a long crisis in her parish priest's life in eastern France.

"I pointed out to him that he was drowning in work, but only as a joke, because it wasn't my job to give him instructions," explains the 72-year-old former parish secretary.

Later, when the priest in question went to rest for several months, Marie updated the community on news about him, but always "while remaining vague".

This importance attached to "discretion" still holds true in the Church of France, as evidenced by the difficulty of gathering information on these delicate issues.

"Making public his discomfort is not the best way to help a priest get back on his feet," argues Father René Pennetier, who counsels priests in the Diocese of Nantes.

"When it's a question of depression, we'll talk about fatigue, to remain prudent," he says. Continue reading

The words of the apostle Paul are a familiar text at weddings, a time when hope is least tempered by experience.

But several new studies suggest the biblical text with its emphasis on consideration for others also may provide the foundation of a spiritual blueprint for lasting, satisfying unions.

Four studies published in the Journal of Family Psychology indicate that cultivating practices such as selfless prayer, spiritual intimacy and compassionate love can help keep couples happily together through the challenges of marriage, from becoming parents to caring for one another amid the infirmities of old age.

And another study in the fall issue of Sociology of Religion finds that individuals who attached great importance to their faith and entered into marriage for religious reasons are less likely to commit adultery.

The latest findings are part of a developing effort to delve deeper into the connection between religion and marriage to identify specific practices and beliefs that predict stronger unions.

Here are five ways faith may help lead to a lifetime of wedded bliss:

Praying for your partner: Asking God for help with one's own needs did not predict stronger romantic relationships, one study of 316 college students found. What did matter in the study of college students, and a separate study of 205 married couples, were divine appeals praying for the welfare of their partner and asking God to watch over her or him. Praying for others was associated with increased commitment and more satisfying relationships, researchers from Florida State University and the University of Georgia found. Continue reading

Sources

• The Association of Religious Data Archives
• Image: Stronger Marriage Blog

Confronted with such a question, the vast majority of people would know that A was the correct answer.

Indeed, most people would know that water in the lungs is proof of death by drowning but that lack of it is proof of death prior to a body being immersed in water.

Now consider the following anecdote, seared on my memory for reasons that will quickly become apparent:

It was a conference at the London School of Economics in the early years of the new century on evolutionary psychology, chaired by the leading sociologist, Prof Lord Giddens, to which I had been invited along with the great and the good of the Darwinian and sociological worlds.

In the course of an extempore comment, I pointed out that, although people indisputably have free will, the free will we have is limited to choosing from menus of options ultimately drawn up by our genes.

I gave the example of suicide, making the obvious point that, although people can kill themselves by refusing food or drink, no one has ever committed suicide by holding their breath!

But at this point a well-known and very eminent professor of biology and neurobiology leapt to his feet and excitedly asked the audience "Whether Dr Badcock has ever heard of suicide by drowning?" A thunder of raucous laughter was immediately followed by hearty applause—and stunned silence on my part. The assembled intellectual elite of Darwinism and social science appeared to believe that people drown by holding their breath, and that my comment was completely laughable. In other words, they had ticked B above! But how could this be possible? How could an elite audience of intellectuals with an average IQ well above 100, chaired by a member of the House of Lords and led by an influential professor, be so confused in its thinking? Continue reading

Source

• Psychology Today
• Image: The Sydney Morning Herald

Among other things, we had "mock confessions", in which (in front of everyone else) the ordinands took turns at being confessor while our professor, the redoubtable Paul Brassell, took the role of the penitent.

Fr Brassell's amazing command of accents and dialects, and the realism of the way he said things whether coming from man, woman or child, made the whole exercise both instructive and entertaining.

Catherine Pepinster's recent column in The Tablet about certain shortcomings in confessional practice (4 January 2014) in matters relating to the sixth commandment raises some significant issues which bring us to the contemporary problems about sexual abuse and how it is responded to. Continue reading.

Source: The Tablet

Image: The Tablet

The rising number of ADHD cases over the past four decades is staggering. In the 1970s, a mere one percent of kids were considered ADHD. By the 1980s, three to five percent was the presumed rate, with steady increases into the 1990s. One eye-opening study showed that ADHD medications were being administered to as many as 17 percent of males in two school districts in southeastern Virginia in 1995.

With numbers like these, we have to wonder if aspects of the disorder parallel childhood itself. Many people recognize the symptoms associated with ADHD: problems listening, forgetfulness, distractibility, prematurely ending effortful tasks, excessive talking, fidgetiness, difficulties waiting one's turn, and being action-oriented. Many also may note that these symptoms encapsulate behaviors and tendencies that most kids seem to find challenging. So what leads parents to dismiss a hunch that their child may be having difficulty acquiring effective social skills or may be slower to mature emotionally than most other kids and instead accept a diagnosis of ADHD?

The answer may lie, at least in part, with the common procedures and clinical atmosphere in which ADHD is assessed. Conducting a sensitive and sophisticated review of a kid's life situation can be time-consuming. Most parents consult with a pediatrician about their child's problem behaviors, and yet the average length of a pediatric visit is quite short. With the clock ticking and a line of patients in the waiting room, most efficient pediatricians will be inclined to curtail and simplify the discussion about a child's behavior. That's one piece of the puzzle. Additionally, today's parents are well versed in ADHD terminology. Continue reading

Sources

• Enrico Gnaulati in The Atlantic
• Image: MentallyFine

Enrico Gnaulati, PhD, is a clinical psychologist based in Pasadena, California.

News of a research study confirming the obvious-that sibling rivalry is an even more pervasive and destructive phenomenon than school bullying-has hit all of the major news outlets, including the most revered of all, The New York Times.

Antibullyism has grown into the most influential field of psychology in history by incorporating more and more interpersonal problems into its domain and lobbying to have its paradigm and recommendations mandated by law.

It has now redefined sibling rivalry as sibling bullying and is pressuring parents to put a stop to it at home.

Fourteen years ago I began warning that the anti-bullying psychology will make school bullying a more serious problem, and my predictions have been validated. I am now predicting that the expansion of anti-bullying psychology into sibling relationships will make home life intolerable (if it isn't already so).

I initially thought the publication of this new research was a terrible development. I realize now it has a silver lining. Anti-sibling-bullying policies will expedite the downfall of the anti-bullying movement as a whole.

I am aware that you, my dear reader, are probably outraged by my prediction, as you almost certainly are a proponent of the anti-bully ideology. However, I assure you its demise will be to everyone's benefit, including your own.

The similarity between the self-esteem and anti-bullying movements

The oxymoronic anti-bullying psychology is bound to end up in the dustbin of history, along with other failed movements, such as the self-esteem movement, because it is built on a faulty foundation. The bigger it becomes, the more certain will be its collapse. Continue reading

Sources

• Izzy Kalman in Psychology Today
• Image: Twitter

Self-confidence, resilience, and fearlessness produce bold leaders who perform well on the job, whether as presidents, CEOs, or war heroes. But the very same virtues are also just a few degrees from antisocial behaviors with decidedly negative consequences. Lack awareness of your own fears and limitations and it's easy to become reckless, impulsive, and callous, ignoring other people's fears and limitations as well.

"Some traits may be like a double-edged sword," says psychologist Scott Lilienfeld, developer of the Psychopathic Personality Inventory and an Emory University professor. "Fearless dominance, for example, may contribute to skillful leadership in the face of a crisis, or to reckless criminality and violence," he reports in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In his personality assessments of 42 presidents, Teddy Roosevelt ranked highest in fearless dominance.

The nature of a virtue is that a vice is almost always hidden inside.

In the newest view of personality, our traits are no longer seen as binary—you are either conscientious or you're not—but as dimensional, existing on a continuum. Not only does each characteristic fall on a spectrum, each holds the grain of its own destruction: Organized becomes obsessive. Daring escalates to risky. Modest slips to insecure. Confident turns to arrogant, cautious to anxious, persuasive to domineering, friendly to ingratiating.

The seven deadly sins might very well have started out as ambition, relaxation, awareness of one's good work, righteous anger, a healthy sexuality, and enjoying a good meal. It's all a matter of degree.

In their recently published book, Fear Your Strengths, executive developers Robert Kaiser and Robert Kaplan say that in their collective 50 years of business consulting and executive coaching, they've seen virtually every virtue taken too far. "We've seen confidence to the point of hubris and humility to the point of diminishing oneself. We've seen vision drift into aimless dreaming and focus narrow down to tunnel vision. Show us a strength, and we'll show you an example where its overuse has compromised performance and probably even derailed a career." Continue reading

Sources

• Psychology Today
• Image: Incredible @rt Gallery

Sarah received treatment for her addiction in prison, and had frequent contact with mental health professionals, but she has never successfully gone without heroin for more than a few days, despite repeated efforts. She funds her habit through state benefits, loans from her mother, and theft. Her father died when she was three. Her mother raised her on her own, working two jobs to make ends meet. Her mother was and is her only stable source of support. Sarah hates herself deeply.

This is a fictional case study, based on the real addicts I come across in my work. But when you picture Sarah, who do you see? One person might imagine a violent and depraved young woman, who has chosen to live on the edge of society and is responsible for her drug use and crimes. Another will see a suffering soul, someone who can't control her desire for heroin and can't be held responsible for the harm she perpetrates on herself or others. Of course, both images of addiction are stereotypes that a moment's reflection should dispel. They polarise and capture our collective imagination. In reality they stop us from facing hard truths about why people become addicts. Continue reading

Sources

• Aeon
• Image: Hawaii Island Recovery

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

A couple of years ago, the idea of God came up, in an incidental way, in the Contemporary Moral Theory course I teach. I generally try not to reveal my particular beliefs and commitments too early in the semester, but since it was late in the course, I felt I could be open with the students about my lack of religious belief. I will never forget the horrified look on one student's face. ‘But Professor Jollimore,' he stammered, ‘how can you not believe in God? You teach ethics for a living!'

I shouldn't have been surprised by this reaction. But I always am. We were 12 weeks into a class that discussed a great variety of recent moral theories, none of which made the slightest reference to any sort of divine power or authority, but this made no difference. After 20 years of living in the US (I was born in Canada), I still tend to forget how many people here assume, simply as a matter of common sense, that the very idea of ‘secular ethics' is an abomination, a contradiction, or both.

I don't want to suggest that this attitude is influential only in the US. It is simply more prominent here. In polls and studies, a majority of Americans don't trust atheists and say they would not vote for a presidential candidate who did not believe in God. ‘Religion' and ‘theology' are still frequently cited in the American media as if they were the sole aspects of human existence responsible for matters of value. ‘We need science to tell us the way things are; we need religion to tell us the way things ought to be,' as people around here like to say. I have spent my career studying the way things ‘ought to be', outside of the scaffolding of any faith or religious tradition. No wonder I find such sentiments rather frustrating. Continue reading

Sources

• Aeon Magazine
• Image: examiner.com

There were men on horseback calling the boys to war and long black cars arriving to steal people away in the dead of night; there were girls who'd wandered the landscape, insane after sexual violations; there was the survival of the fittest in concentration camps; there were pregnant women beaten until their children were lost and bodies piled up in times of famine; there was arrest and exile for the theft of a turnip; there were those who were battered for being a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim or a Bahá'í.

Let's say that, in the world of ideas that swirled around you, approximations were made of how to make sense of this mess: the presence of certain kinds of states; the presence of certain kinds of social diversity; the presence of certain kinds of religions. And let's say that the shattering stories had piled on over the years and at some point you just snapped. And you wanted to study war no more.

As it turns out, it's harder to study peace than you might think. Continue reading

Sources

• Margaret Paxson in Aeon Magazine
• Image: Get-Covers

These are the ethical questions presented by the revelations of psychological research conducted in Melbourne almost four decades ago.Behind the Shock Machine, by Melbourne author and psychologist Gina Perry (launched last week), documents and analyses the so called 'willingness to torture' experiments, conducted by the psychology department of Latrobe University in the 1970s.

The experimenters' intent was to observe the capacity of first year students to inflict pain by electrically shocking others, and to extrapolate the findings to humanity as a whole. Ironically the academics who designed and implemented the research may themselves be seen as subjects to be analysed.

The studies were a replica of the Yale Professor Stanley Milgram experiments of 1963 where subjects were asked (and verbally coerced) to inflict painful electric shocks on others despite hearing the screams of pain. Controversially these studies were performed at the time of the trial in Israel of Nazi Adolf Eichmann whose defence had been that he was 'just following orders'.

The experiments may have come out of a desire to test an ethnocentric conceit that Nazism was somehow a Germanic cultural flaw. However Milgram concluded that 65 per cent of Americans may have by implication been as capable as the Nazis of following such orders.

The double irony of the Milgram and Latrobe experiments is the apparent insensitivity of the academic staff and researchers to the evidence of the emotional pain they were inflicting on the subjects of their experiments. When the Latrobe staff disclosed, sometimes laughingly, that the shocks and screams had been faked, it left many subjects with an awareness of their own dark side. Continue reading

Sources

• Lyn Bender in Eureka Street
• Image: textually.org