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Time magazine recently published its annual cover story on health, focusing on the relationship between mind and body. To its credit, it contains some rarely heard criticisms of the mental-health laws, which nearly everyone accepts as appropriate in the land of the free. But as John Cloud writes, “[Psychiatric] diagnoses can be used by courts to lock you up in a mental hospital.” He should have added: “. . . even if you have never harmed anyone.” Cloud goes far in exposing the mere mortals who impersonate imposing psychiatric wizards: “Though it’s fashionable these days to think of psychiatry as just another arm of medicine, there is no biological test for any of these disorders.”
This is psychiatry’s dark secret. But it’s true. “Diseases” of the mind — a metaphorical organ — must be metaphorical diseases, as psychiatric critic Thomas Szasz has been saying for half a century.
Cloud also quotes Paul McHugh, chairman of Johns Hopkins medical school’s department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, saying that the profession’s vaunted Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) has “permitted groups of ‘experts’ with a bias to propose the existence of conditions without anything more than a definition and a checklist of symptoms. This is just how witches used to be identified.” Szasz said that years ago, too.
But Cloud ends on an ominous note: “Unless brain researchers discover exactly how neurological mechanisms become abnormal, the DSM will always include more hypotheses than answers.” The problem with that sentence is the premise that neurological mechanisms control behavior.
There’s the rub. It is the fashion to believe that behavior is the product of brain activity, and that’s the dominant message Time delivers.
Indeed, the special issue begins with this: “Mind and body, psychologists and neurologists now agree, aren’t that different. . .. The thoughts and emotions that seem to color our reality are the result of complex electrochemical interactions within and between nerve cells…. [The] mind [is] like the rest of the body….”
This is scientific and philosophic balderdash.
The “mind,” Szasz writes in contrast, is a metaphor for the internal conversation about ourselves and our surroundings that each of us conducts throughout our lives. To be sure, thoughts and emotions require electrochemical processes — we’re not ghosts — but to reduce them to such processes is to make robots out of persons. I laugh at a funny experience, not at a funny electrochemical interaction. All the positron-emission tomography, functional magnetic resonance, and magneto-encephalography in the world can’t refute that.
The Time issue sinks deepest into the muck of reductionism with an article by Steven Pinker, the psychologist who has done so much to popularize the reduction of mind to brain. Pinker’s article is a dissent from those who see genes as controlling our behavior. But what he gives with one hand, he takes away with the other: “Behavior is caused by the activity of the brain, and the most genes can do is affect its wiring, size, shape and sensitivity to hormones and other molecules. Among the brain circuits laid down by genes are the ones that reflect on memories, current circumstances and the anticipated consequences of various courses of action and that select behavior accordingly — in an intricate and not entirely predictable way.”
For Pinker, persons don’t reflect, anticipate, and select. Circuits do. Behavior is caused, not unlike the movement of billiard balls. Nevertheless he writes, “These circuits are what we call ‘free will,’ and providing them with information about the likely consequences of behavioral options is what we call ‘holding people responsible.’”
This is gobbledygook, which, unfortunately, unreflective people will assume is based in good science. But any theory which denies that persons choose is self-subverting. To speak is to carry out an intention to communicate thoughts and experiences by freely choosing suitable words and sentences. To announce that one cannot freely choose is to announce that one is not really speaking but only making random noises by electrochemical necessity. Let us take him at his “word.”
This isn’t just inconsequential ivory-tower science. If we come to believe that metaphysical freedom is impossible, we will hardly be in a position to complain when our political freedom is taken away.