Exordium

Time doesn't really exist. It isn't built into the basic physical laws of the universe. Whether time can end or not is irrelevant, because it does not exist in the first place.

I suppose psychoanalysis could be considered a combination of science with intuition, or "art", but psychology is a science in my opinion.

I don't know much about this. The procedure is known as rTMS (repeated transcranial magnetic stimulation)' date=' and it is still considered an "alternative" treatment. Here's a Passage from [i']The Noonday Demon: An Anatomy of Depression[/i] by Andrew Solomon: I found this article on the net which deals with using rTMS to treat schichophrenia: http://info.med.yale.edu/psych/clinics/rTMS.html

How long ago was this? This sounds like a typical case in that ect is often used as a last resort, after all other treatments have failed. It has some benefits other treatments do not have, such as immediate or almost immediate results. It is often used to treat elderly folks for depression. Btw, forget what you've seen in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest": ect does not cause muscle spams or convulsions, despite its name -- not anymore. In fact, the patient doesn't really feel anything at all during it.

Unbelievable. If I were your friend, I would immediately file for divorce, report him to the authorities and get a restraining order against him. People can often be prosecuted for violent crimes years after the fact.

Pedophilia isn't a natural sexual orientation, it's a mental illness. But nevertheless each pedophile is always responsible for his/her own behaviour. For example, the American Psychiatry Association does not consider homosexulity a mental illness, but they do include pedophilia in their diagnostic manual. As for the law, well, most civilized have outlawed sex with indivuduals under 16 or 18 years of age.

I can definitely agree that rape is about payback and revenge. There exists a type of rapist who has been raised by an abusive single mother, unable to form healthy relationships with the opposite sex, and who uses rape to avenge himself of his mother and womanhood in general. I think we should look at the time a person seeks treatment for pedophilia. If someone comes to a psychiatrist's office or checks himself into a mental hospital, and states that he has violent sexual urges towards children and fears he may not be able to control himself much longer -- well, this is the type of person who needs and deserves our help, and can actually benefit from it. On the other hand, if a pedophile is caught after years of abusing who knows how many kids (therefore causing them irreparable trauma), and he then throws up his hands and says: "I'm mentally ill! I need help!", well... I think the reason pedophiles are hard to cure simply because what they do gives them pleasure, and because it is still, despite everything, easy to get away with doing what they do. Children don't vote, they don't pass laws and they don't pay taxes. Pedophiles do. This is a very hard question. The fact is that the recividism rate for pedophiles, especially those focused on children of their own sex, is staggeringly high. I think at the moment it is more important to contain this phenomenon than to debate about what causes it. To answer your question, people under 18 can be monsters too, and letting them loose in society will only cause harm -- as terrible as that sounds.

... and therefore I'm unable to vote in polls, start threads, etc... Can anyone help?

My apologies for the empty message above this one. My answers to your question are: unvalid question, yes, no. I believe that pehdphilia is a mental illness, yes, but pedophiles aren't insane in the sense that they don't know what they are doing, or do not understand that it is wrong. All child abusers have themselves suffered chronic and systematic abuse themselves as children. That is the only way to produce a pedophile. There is no genetic code for it -- people don't become pehophiles "naturally". Finally, I don't think pedophilia is a sexual act, it's an act of violence, like rape. Can pedophiles be treated? Usually not. In a psychotherapy the patient must be a participant in the treatment, not a recipient of it. But most pedophiles are only willing to undergo treatment to minimize the consequences of their actions, and to be able to repeat them as soon as possible. What to do with them? I'm tempted to say that 9mm of hot lead to the back of the neck would be the easiest, cheapest, quickest and the most efficient solution. But I'll go with incarreration until the late middle age, when most pedophiles lose their urges.