yitwail wrote:John Jones wrote:
A bodily structure is dubbed a disorder only if it interferes with our lives. That is the ethical basis of the term 'disorder'. However, a judgement of a 'brain disorder' can also be immoral. In a judgement of brain disorder we make a moral decision that certain feelings or experiences are not acceptable, but then we go on to claim that that this is because of physical reasons.
Earlier, you seemed to characterize mental disorders as based on social judgement, but here you seem to leave open the possibility that an individual can make his or her own informed judgement that he or she has a mental disorder. On that basis, an individual can be mentally disordered from the viewpoint of society at large, yet consider himself or herself normal, and vice versa. In the case when both society and the individual agree that a mental disorder is present, however, and the individual experiences relief through psychiatric treatment, the question of whether or not there was an actual mental disorder seems to me to have little practical significance.
The term 'mental disorder' drops out of the reckoning in your example as an irrelevant and confusing third consideration, even though the term is powerfully persuasive. If the public find a person's behaviour unacceptable, then they may want to do something about it, whether or not the person is willing to co-operate. They may decide to employ techniques that force the person to behave differently, such as using chemicals. But no-one can say that their decision was based on information supplied by the brain to the effect that its chemicals needed changing.
It is also not possible in the physical sciences to quantify a physical 'disorder', as disorder is not a physical category in the sense in which it used in medicine... the brain cannot tell us from an examination of its chemicals, whether its chemicals need changing. We employ confusing terms to hide this fact, terms like mental disorder or illness. We are not quite sure what the scientist means by disorder in a mental context except that where there is disorder of behaviour (a peculiar phrase), there might be disorder of brain. We are persuaded to think that maybe the two are linked because they have the word 'disorder' in common. But a judgement of unacceptable behaviour is quite distinct from a physical structure. We can map one to the other, as much as we can map anything to anything else, but there is no relationship demonstrated.
