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Critical Introduction - The Meaning of Sexual Health
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What is Sexual Health?
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No eternal truths
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In our modern world, the experts on human sexuality are no longer religious, but medical authorities. They cannot base their judgements on the unchanging word of God, but only on scientific insight, and this insight may change in the course of time. Moreover, medicine - and especially psychiatry - is an applied science that cannot afford theoretical purity at all costs. Like it or not, it must be pragmatic, and it cannot move too far ahead of the general moral consensus of its time. Psychiatrists must present rational and practical arguments in differentiating between good and bad or even between larger and smaller evils. Dogmatism and abstract reasoning are not helpful when a patient asks for relief from sexual compulsions or when the state of mind of a sex offender has to be evaluated. Here the patients themselves or worried families or criminal courts expect clear statements that they can understand and deal with. However, even in these cases, medical and psychiatric experts should not claim to possess an alleged objective and eternal truth, but should openly state why they themselves think that here and now certain behaviors are inacceptable.
It is only by revealing its own value judgements that psychiatry can gain the necessary authority and acceptance in our increasingly secular and multicultural societies. |
