Decisional incapacity

You'll often encounter talk of the decisional incapacity, or irrationality and incompetence, of the psychiatric slave in the voluminous vomitings of the more literate proponents of forced treatment. One problem with this concept is that it implicitly postulates the existence of "rational man", whose thinking is clear and logical (unclouded by emotion), who bases his decisions on rational thought processes, as exemplified by the concept of homo economicus. This may make people feel smug and superior at the expense of those whom they label irrational, but it has no basis in fact, because man is an irrational animal, simply not deserving of his lunacy being dignified as rational or sane, his mind riddled as it is with biases and heuristics. Szasz was right; the brain is the rationalizing organ, not the reasoning organ.

Hence the existence of so many concepts and experiments in psychology and social psychology that point to the predominant lunacy of the species. Take the concept of the affect heuristic, which basically posits that emotions affect decisions, usually in a direction away from what is rational or true. Now you may not agree with this as an explanation, but the reality of human irrationality it points to seems pretty incontestable.

Take for example man's inconsistency in his attitudes towards radiation exposure.

People regularly make the decision to go to the beach and soak up huge amounts of radiation, yet they have all sorts of mostly irrational fears about leaks from nuclear power plants, which even in the eventuality that there was a leak, would probably only expose us to a small portion of what we are exposed to when we go to the beach.

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This is a classic example of the decisional incapacity of so-called sane people. Going to the beach is associated with positive emotions and images that affect how people think about a threat and make decisions, in this case underestimating the risk of getting skin cancer and going to the beach regularly because their thinking is predicated on the positive emotions associated with going to the beach. The words and images of the nuclear power plant on the other hand are associated with the negative emotion of fear, generated by amongst other things pictures of the chernobyl disaster.

The same can be said with a licit substance like alcohol and illicit substances like marijuana. People underestimate the risks, which are great, of immoderate alcohol consumption, because alcohol is a part of our cultural heritage and associated in the culture (especially in adverts and soap operas) with images of happiness and conviviality, whereas they overestimate the risks of smoking pot (which are comparatively far smaller) because people's emotional reflexes (emotions upon which our thinking is predicated) are conditioned by the culture (mainly the media and advertising industry) in a way that leads us to overestimate the risks, because our thoughts are based upon fear and hosility, so that we support legislation that legally enshrines the irrational, mindless persecution of people who take illegal drugs.

Parents stop their children from going out to play because of a media orchestrated collective panic about peadophiles, brilliantly satirized in the comedy Brass Eye.

Such people like the aforementioned are not thinking rationally or making rational decisions yet where this might endanger the health of the individual (such as with people who underestimate the risks of smoking, going to the beach, partaking in extreme sports which regularlry kills, or drunken driving, to name just a few) this is not used as a justification for detaining innocent people without the observance of the procedural safeguards in place for those denominated sane citizens and forcing ostensible treatments upon them.

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Some people in the mental health movement like to say these people, so-called schizophrenics and manic depressives for examples (people love also to conserve cognitve energy by thinking in stereotypes and generalizations, another example of a species of irrationality of which we all partake), are not as rational as "us", which is another example of people thinking in terms of the binary opposition of "us and them", something to which oppressors and their supporters are especially prone in their rationalization of their domination of others, as anyone acquainted with the history of male supremacism, white supremacism, and psychiatric supremacism (self-serving ideologies formulated in response to the need to justify unequal, non-reciprocal intergroup relations) should know.

Indeed, only recently someone wandered into this forum and said such a thing. Such people are bigots, no matter in what terms and intonations they couch their bigotry. What's worse, apart from Szasz, few of the more famous critics question the sterotype of the irrational mental patient, instead trying to explain away his irrationality, like some people liked to explain away the stereotypical laziness of black people, by reference to social and developmental conditions, which surreptitiously reinforces the steroetype.

The fabled incompetence and decisional incapacity of the patient is usually used injunctively to disregard his protests and expressed wishes because they are at variance with the desires and interests of his oppressors. It has no basis in fact.

If anything, it is the patient who, on this issue, is being rational, because patients who refuse to take drugs usually do so because, unlike their rational oppressors, they have actually taken the drugs and have come to the decision that life is insufferable living in a chemical straitjacket. Simple.

The truth is, rationality is like liberty, a phantom. Man deludes himself he is rational just like he deludes himself he is free, when he is neither.

When it comes to us humans, it would be a more realistic appraisal of our capacities to talk in terms of bounded rationality than to delude ourselves that we are truly sane or rational, an idea which states that in terms of thinking and decision-making a person's capacity for rational thought and decision making, irrespective of his legal status, is limited by the information he has and the limitations of the human brain.

The whole problem with the mental health field is that it is a fantasy field in which they don't have to prove any of this stuff.

1013 victim wrote:The whole problem with the mental health field is that it is a fantasy field in which they don't have to prove any of this stuff.

Too true. The fact that they don't, in an age when man is aware of the scientific method, is further evidence of the irrationality of people. We invoke the canons of science when convenient, but when not, we accept on faith the pronouncements of authority. How rational.

As Richard Feynman said, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." Yet supposedly we are anti-science!

Cledwyn Bulbs wrote:

1013 victim wrote:The whole problem with the mental health field is that it is a fantasy field in which they don't have to prove any of this stuff.

Too true. The fact that they don't, in an age when man is aware of the scientific method, is further evidence of the irrationality of people. We invoke the canons of science when convenient, but when not, we accept on faith the pronouncements of authority. How rational.

As Richard Feynman said, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." Yet supposedly we are anti-science!

Its sad that they fantasize with other peoples lives. The only thing serious about the mental health field is the amount of power and control they have. Everything else is a joke.