Not even mental health experts agree on this. The American Psychiatric Association, which supported the government, argued that mental illness is a physical disease that should be treated like any other. "The brain is an organ just like the liver is an organ and the heart is an organ," said Dr. Renee Leslie Binder, a psychiatrist who advised the association on its court brief. "If someone has an infection, you don't tell them to breathe deeply. You give them antibiotics to fight the infection. When someone has a brain disease, the main form of treatment is medication." New York Times, June 21, 2003
Rather mechanistic view of the brain, don't you think? All of your behaviours, your personality, your fantasies, your desires, your hopes and dreams-- are all the result of chemical processes and physical properties. The brain is not really different from your liver or your heart. If this is true, somewhere in the distant future, we will be able to fix your brain.
How will you know if your brain needs fixing?
You don't want your brain "fixed"? Well, that is the issue, isn't it. Who gets to decide? Who decides if your brain needs to be fixed?
Dr. Charles Thomas Sell was charged with Medicaid fraud five years ago. When he appeared at trial, he cursed, spat, and screamed, according to the New York Times. He was deemed "emotionally disturbed" by the judge and incarcerated in a hospital. Not fit to stand trial, mentally.
The government-- the prosecution-- asked the courts to allow it to force Dr. Sell to take medications for his illness. They believed that the medications would make him sane. They want to help Dr. Sell. After curing him, they could put him on trial and then imprison him for his crimes.
Of course, if Dr. Sell needs medications to make him sane, it raises the possibility that he was not sane when he committed his crimes. Is the prosecution willing to argue that he is sane enough to stand trail because we have cured the insanity that caused him to commit crimes? I somehow doubt it.
Is this a little like the police charging someone with a murder committed with a high-powered rifle. After discovering that he couldn't shoot straight, they decide to send him out for fire-arms training before they put him on trial? Or an impotent man charged with rape. Can they require him to take Viagra before going on trial?
A similar case was ruled on in Ontario in June 2003. A 47-year-old gentleman named Scott Starson, who is regarded as something as whiz in physics, had asked for the right to refuse to take medication which, he claimed, prevented him from working on his physics. Starson wrote a paper on physics in 1991, with the collaboration of a Stanford physics professor. However, his doctors and his mother felt that he should be ordered to take medication for his mental illness. Starson believes that the medications his doctors want to forcibly inject him with slow down his brain. He says that that would be "worse than death".
Here's the clincher. At a hearing, Starson's doctors admitted that none of the medications had helped him in the past, and that they could not be sure that any of the medications would help him in the future. Not only can we try to force you to let us mess with your mind, but we can even do experiments on it.
The courts in Ontario ruled otherwise. Mr. Starson, it ruled, has a right to think for himself.
What if we had a doctor of society who said that our society was sick? We engage in a mad pursuit of dubious gratifications. We exploit poor people and oppress the powerless. We sell tools of murder and destruction. We destroy the environment.
What we need is for a doctor of society to decide that our society is no longer capable of making rational decisions and, therefore, it should be fixed. All Third World Debt is forgiven, and we will move to a 30-hour work week, with six weeks guaranteed vacation every year. How do you like that? This doctor goes to court and asks a judge to give him the power to fix society.
So who gets to decide?