Psychiatry Stakes Out “Moral” Improvement
filed in Issues, Media Coverage, Psychiatrists and Doctors on Sep.09, 2008
A new article in the British Journal of Psychiatry argues that psychiatrists are already helping to improve people’s “moral character” with their drugs, not just their mental health, and therefore should embrace this role. The Wired Science blog discusses the topic with stunning obliviousness to the horrors underlying the real question being asked: Since many (arguably most) people take psychiatric drugs from psychiatrists under legal force or coercion, should we allow psychiatrists to also become our society’s ultimate arbiters of individual moral good? The BJP article itself states that lack of “insight” in the mentally ill “deprives [them] of moral agency” — so guess who’s being set up for A Clockwork Orange re-conditioning program! Of course, this isn’t news to some: many people who’ve been drugged against their wills have long been arguing that they are victims not of “helping doctors” but of people who see themselves as moral crusaders.
September 11th, 2008 on 3:46 pm
Oh yes, this smacks of Marxism all over again. Your morals are greatly improved if you are powerless to live your own life, make your own mistakes and learn from them. Your morals are greatly improved if you are a mindless zombie on drugs and not able to live your own life but must be taken care of by someone else all your life so how can you possibly be immoral or truly moral for that matter?
There are psychopolitical operatives in our society, in hospitals, schools, universities, etc.. whose main job is to demoralize us to the point where we need our drugs and our experts to ‘come to our rescue’ and take us to la-la land where everything is rosy and taken care of by someone else and our minds are shut up and locked up forever so we will never say another sane, common sense thing as long as we live. THIS IS COMMUNISM!
September 12th, 2008 on 4:52 am
Even worse, it’s actually capitalism!
September 27th, 2008 on 9:15 pm
They can’t have it both ways. They can’t call it an “illness” and then also call it immorality. Where is any evidence that people with psychiatric labels have morals or moral or immoral behaviors any different than the rest of the population. My observation and experience tells me that labelled folks tend to be more honest than the rest of the population often getting us/them into trouble in a culture that values lying to get what you want or to placate others.
September 28th, 2008 on 12:29 am
Oh, but they’re definitely trying to have it both ways! I think this psychiatrist’s logic is: Your “sickness” IS your “immorality”… immorality itself is defined as a mental illness, and therefore needs to be “treated”…
You make a good point — there’s no evidence to suggest people with psychiatric labels are less or more moral than anyone else. But that’s where these psychiatrists are seeing the next new frontier: the immoral, too, can be labelled ill and then “cured”.
And when we think about it, isn’t much of psychiatry already a process of making moral judgments about other people’s character?