This is NPR. . .

This is NPR, and here’s an adorable human interest story for you: 

A young alcoholic “comes out” to his father with a text message:  “Hey dad, I’m going to go get drunk tonight.”  Aww. 

<cue record scratching noise>  Wait.  What?

No, NPR would not run this as a cutesy human interest clip, because most people realize that drinking for the express purpose of getting drunk constitutes alcohol abuse, and that starting down a road of abusing alcohol can lead to alcoholism, which is terribly harmful, even potentially lethal, to both the person living that life of alcoholism and to others.  A regular habit of abusing alcohol will cause serious harm to a person’s physical and psychological health, and will badly damage social relationships.  A properly informed and loving parent, therefore, would not find this news “sweet,” but alarming.

But this morning, I woke up to something incredibly similar:

A young man “comes out” to his father with a text message:  “Hey dad, I’m going out with my boyfriend.”  Aww. 

<cue record scratching noise—in my head, anyway>  Wait.  WHAT?

Now, some of you are thinking, “that analogy is flawed.”  And of course, you are right.  Here’s how right you are:

The average life expectancy for the typical U.S. male is in the high 70’s, creeping up toward 80 years of age.

The average life expectancy of an alcoholic is 66.

The average life expectancy of a male homosexual is 47.

Wait.  WHAT?!

Yes, that’s correct.  Alcoholism will (on average) take about twelve years off your life.  Homosexuality will take THIRTY.

Here are some other “fun facts”:

Like alcoholics, homosexuals are far more likely to engage in deliberate self-injurious behavior (e.g., cutting, suicide attempts, actual completed suicide).

While there is no good evidence that alcoholism is related to domestic abuse, the incidence of domestic violence among homosexual men is nearly double that in the heterosexual population.

About 37 percent of alcoholics have at least one serious mental illness; nearly HALF of homosexual men meet diagnostic criteria for major psychiatric disorders.  (And this is not, as some would argue, all stress-related, a result of living in a culture where homosexuals are not “accepted for who they are;” these results are found even in countries where homosexuality has been accepted for quite some time.)

So you’re right, the analogy is flawed, because to live as a homosexual is actually more harmful than living as an alcoholic.

If you find out that your child is abusing alcohol, it isn’t loving the child to “accept” that abuse as “who he is” and get on with your life.  To love someone is to will the good for that person.  To will someone else’s good means to act to promote that good.  In the case of an alcohol-abusing teen, that means acting to curtail that harmful behavior and get them help in mastering their relationship with alcohol.

Abusing one’s sexuality is every bit as harmful as abusing alcohol.  Indeed, even a very quick survey (check it out for yourself on nami.org, cdc.gov, nih.gov) of physical, psychological, and social effects with respect to alcoholism vs. this particular form of abuse of one’s sexuality indicates that it is worse. 

If your child comes to you with such news as NPR wants to present as a heart-warming anecdote, it is not a loving response to smile indulgently and say, “That’s okay, Johnny, whatever makes you happy!”  It is not okay.  It will not make him happy in the long run, any more than living life as an active alcoholic makes somebody genuinely happy.  It is the beginning of a road which will lead to harm, to himself and to others, and a loving parent must take this as an indication at the very least to attempt to intervene with guidance toward healthier choices. 

HPV Vaccine

Adding my voice to the others that are very disappointed to see an article 

(here: http://www.catholic.org/health/story.php?id=51447 )

 in clear support of a vaccine that has serious problems, both simply biomedical and moral.  You will notice that the vaccine reduces the rate of infection FOR THE STRAINS it was developed to prevent.  I should hope so.  But it does not reduce infections by other strains, which also cause cancer, and it has caused life-threatening and life-ruining side effects (including horrific and untreatable neurological problems and death).  Further, adhering to the church's teachings regarding sexual morality would prevent 100% of all HPV infections with no side effects whatsoever.  As a neuroscientist, there is no way I would allow my child to be given this vaccine; and I am very, VERY sad to see this article clearly supporting it here on a supposedly Catholic site.  Simply keeping sexual activity sacred, which ought to be our recommendation even if there were no such thing as STD's, is unquestionably the most effective and healthiest prevention, and is available FREE to all.

Another, more detailed, bit of "Back to School" advice along these lines:

back-to-school-tip-for-moms-and-dads 

A "Mini Trinity"

What I'm trying to explore here is a concept of health for the human being.  We can't really do that, if we don't know what a human being is; and our culture is supremely unhelpful in this.  In fact, it's worse than unhelpful, it's actively misleading with respect to the truth of human existence (or, indeed, the existence of truth at all, but that's a whole 'nother gigantic, over-arching can of worms. . . [and who the heck puts worms in a "can" anyway?--but I digress. . . ]).

So here's the first thing, foundational to any effective exploration of human health.  People, our Creator tells us, are "made in the image of God."  One of the ways this is reflected is that, like God, we exist in "trinity."  Not the complete and mysterious "three whole persons who are also one" that we are confronted with in God, but a "mini trinity," which is a bit easier to grasp, but comes with a mini dose of its own mystery and a concomitant difficulty of applying the concept to right living.  We'll give it a go:

In contrast to our culture, which increasingly is attempting to treat people as if they are nothing but bodies (the "Scientism" cult of the "New" Atheists being the height of this), or the lingering notion of most of our (basically Protestant-derived) culture (still, for now), that wants to see people as essentially a physical body with a mind (which possibly somehow includes a "soul," if there is one???) "riding around" in the body (for a while), the truth is that people have three aspects, which dynamically interact and indeed form one person, although the three aspects are recognizable as different aspects, but really not, in practice, treatable as separate "entities," because (here's the mystery), although we can recognize them as three "different" things, in reality, they are one person.  Very much like the Trinity. 

If I haven't lost you already, here's what I propose to do, and the caveat required in the attempt:

Human beings, for health, need a number of things (some of the more obvious including air, water, food, for example).  My contention is that, if we ignore the fact that we are NOT just physical bodies, and neglect to provide the necessities (food, water, etc.) for ALL that we are, we WILL be sick, period.  In other words, no matter how well you feed your BODY, if you ignore the other two-thirds of what you are, your body will suffer, because you are not feeding ALL of you properly.  Because the whole person is a trinity, caring for only one aspect (or two) is by definition neglect of the whole person.  And because you are only one person, neglecting even one aspect will hurt the whole.  Anything you do to your body, for example, affects your mind (and your spirit); anything you do to your spirit affects your body (and your mind); and so on.

Definition of terms: 

J.W. Waterhouse,
"Psyche Entering
Cupid's Garden"

For purposes of discussion here, I'm going to take the Biblical notion of the whole person, which includes "spirit, soul, and body" (e.g., 1 Thess. 5:23).  However, because our modern parlance tends to use the words "spirit" and "soul" interchangeably, for clarity I'm going to use the actual Greek word--"psyche"--that is the actual word used by St. Paul in this context, but which is usually translated as "soul" here.  This word indicates and includes what Psychologists generally study (and thus gives the discipline its name); things like mental activity, cognitive capacity, emotions, motivation, etc.  So, for purposes of discussion, I'm going to use "spirit" to indicate the aspect that most people think of as the eternal or "super-natural" existence of a person; that "part" of us that can most directly relate to God (and other spirits).  To talk about the mind, conscious thought, and most crucially important here, the will, I'll use St. Paul's own word, psyche, which is more inclusive and thus more precise than simply using the "mind" (as I did above, for ease of discussion before this definition), and which I trust is not too taxing for any reader who has bothered to follow me this far, anyway!  It is a word we hear used occasionally, after all, even in fairly casual modern speech.  For body, I'll just use "body."  That'll probably do just fine, don't you think?  Whew. 

That'll get us started.  Planned explorations include "Things We Need" (such as food, water, air, pressure, movement, sunlight, rest) and how these apply with respect to proper care of your WHOLE person, not just your material body; as well as "Things We Don't Need" (such as toxins and extremes), which we must avoid or resist, otherwise we will sicken and die. 

The caveat:

Treating the human person in these three aspects carries with it, of course, the danger of "splitting" the reality of the person; of further "splintering" our concept of human living.  However, with that risk acknowledged, I think we must proceed in this way, in order to counter our culture's habit of completely denying one or more of these aspects and behaving as if they don't exist at all (or at least don't matter).  We really can't hope to properly care for ourselves and promote our overall health if we are utterly ignoring some important aspect of our health.  If, somehow, you were unaware that you needed protein, and therefore proceeded to make a constant diet of nothing but carbohydrates, say--or, if you were one of those misled folks who went all out on the Atkins diet and decided to make your constant diet of nothing BUT protein and fat for an extended period of time--you would live for a while, but all the time you would steadily be declining in health, eventually (sooner or later, depending on the level of imbalance and what you are choosing to neglect) to a mortal extent (just ask Dr. Jekyll).  So the intent here is to promote greater awareness of the neglected aspects of our human selves, so as to correct our culture's bizarrely imbalanced (and increasingly so) notion of what the human being is, and how to promote its health.

Ready, set--