Staff on psychiatric wards at risk for violent abuse

As seen in this news item

In the Italian psychiatric facilities, there are more than 1,000 cases a year of violence against health care workers. And in twenty years 8 of them were killed. The victims are usually doctors and nurses that, in this country, take care of over 3.5 million patients. Very often they are drug addicts who do not have a specific mental disorder, but access these health services because they are the only ones available to the public. This is the complaint of the SIP (Italian Society of Psychiatry), launched for the First National Day of health and safety of the health workers to the care of psychiatric patients, which takes place today in Bari.

Given the admitted inability of Psychiatry to provide any cures, and with this evidence that they cannot rehabilitate people, why would anyone want to join a failed profession?

Psycho-Analyst Priest claims he was 'only pretending to be gay'

Given all of the trouble the Catholic Church has had in recent years, you know this will just invite more problems. Our interest is in the psychoanalyst angle, not the religious angle. As reported on CNN

A Vatican official suspended after being caught on hidden camera making advances to a young man said in an interview published Sunday that he is not gay and was only pretending to be gay as part of his work.

In an interview with La Repubblica newspaper, Monsignor Tommaso Stenico said he frequented online gay chat rooms and met with gay men as part of his work as a psychoanalyst.

He said that he pretended to be gay in order to gather information about "those who damage the image of the Church with homosexual activity."

Vatican teaching holds that homosexual activity is a sin.

"It's all false; it was a trap. I was a victim of my own attempts to contribute to cleaning up the Church with my psychoanalyst work," La Repubblica quoted Stenico as saying.

Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said Saturday that the monsignor had been suspended pending a Vatican investigation.

Stenico is a top official in the Vatican's Congregation of the Clergy. The Vatican acted after officials recognized Stenico's office in the background of a television program on gay priests that was broadcast on Oct. 1 on La7, a private Italian TV network.

Stenico was secretly filmed making advances to a young man and asserting that gay sex was not sinful. In the Repubblica interview, Stenico said he had met with the young man and pretended to talk about homosexuality "to better understand this mysterious and faraway world which, by the fault of a few people -- among them some priests -- is doing so much harm to the Church."

He said he had never been gay and was heterosexual, but remained faithful to his vow of celibacy.

Italy's Sky TG24 said Stenico had written a letter to his superiors with a similar defense. Calls to Stenico's home and Vatican office went unanswered Sunday.

Psychiatrist Stabs a Top Italian Psychologist

Italian police have arrested a former psychiatrist for stabbing to death a psychologist who had reportedly recommended he be committed to a hospital for treatment of mental illness. Italian state television broke into its newscast on August 7th to report the arrest of Arturo Geoffroy, 47, who had just taken a dip in the sea at a beach in Camogli, near Genoa. Lorenzo Bignamini, 42, a psychologist at a Milan hospital, was chased and stabbed in the heart on Saturday on a Milan street as bystanders watched in horror. Lorenzo Bignamini had been President of the Societa Italiana Di Psicologia Clinica Medica [Italian Society of Medical Clinical Psychology].