Okay, here’s today’s ethical question, from an occurance in Australia. A child psychologist at a children’s hospital has admitted to arranging for a terminally ill 15-year-old boy to visit a prostitute before he died.
While everyone realized it was illegal (particularly since the parents were not informed), there’s been quite a bit of anonymous support, as well as official condemnation of the episode.
[The psychologist] said he felt no qualms over not informing the boy’s parents about what was happening, saying that, like most 15-year-old boys, his patient was unwilling to talk to them about sex. The boy had little opportunity to meet girls of his own age, having been in and out of hospital since the age of 12.
“He’d been sick for quite a long period and his schooling was very disrupted, so he had not had many opportunities to acquire and retain friends, and his access to young women was pretty poor,” said the specialist. “But he was very interested in young women and was experiencing that surge of testosterone that teenage boys have.”
Okay, the parent side of me wants to say, hey, that child was the responsibility of his parents, and they should have been at least consulted over such “therapy.” The libertarian side of me says, hey, the kid was dying, it made him happy, just think of it as a “Make a Wish” trip to someplace other than Disneyland. And the slippery-slope side of me says, well, maybe it was okay in this particular case, but it’s sure not the sort of thing we want to encourage (of either our kids or our kids’ shrinks).
Boy, I wish I had easy answers for all of these sorts of questions. Instead, all I get is multiple sides of me arguing over them.
(Via Bazima)
As a not-parent and a guy this is a complete no-brainer. Give the shrink a raise.