"Modern medicine pivots on the promise that portraying human suffering as biological disease will lead to insight and cures. Inescapably, this enterprise has a sociopolitical dimension. To say which of our travails can (and should) come under medicine’s purview is, implicitly if not explicitly, to present a vision of human agency, of the nature of the good life, of who deserves precious social resources like money and compassion. Such questions, of course, aren’t always pressing; the observation that a broken leg is a problem only in a society that requires mobility seems trivial.
But by virtue of its focus on our mental lives, and especially on our subjective experience of the world and ourselves, psychiatry, far more directly than other medical specialties, implicates our conception of who we are and how our lives should be lived. It raises, in short, moral questions. If you convince people that their moods are merely electrochemical noise, you are also telling them what it means to be human, even if you only intend to ease their pain."
"Modern medicine pivots on the promise that portraying human suffering as biological disease will lead to insight and cures. Inescapably, this enterprise has a sociopolitical dimension. To say which of our travails can (and should) come under medicine’s purview is, implicitly if not explicitly, to present a vision of human agency, of the nature of the good life, of who deserves precious social resources like money and compassion. Such questions, of course, aren’t always pressing; the observation that a broken leg is a problem only in a society that requires mobility seems trivial.
But by virtue of its focus on our mental lives, and especially on our subjective experience of the world and ourselves, psychiatry, far more directly than other medical specialties, implicates our conception of who we are and how our lives should be lived. It raises, in short, moral questions. If you convince people that their moods are merely electrochemical noise, you are also telling them what it means to be human, even if you only intend to ease their pain."