An Ethical Lobotomy and Depersonalisation

Is it right to change someone’s reality? Is it ethical to administer drugs, to remove the world that someone has always known, and replace it with our own?

Take a schizophrenic. Imagine her name was Mary. Mary has an entourage of small animals. They follow her wherever she goes. They speak to her. Toby the rabbit does her calculations and everyday math. The badger, Gloria, watches out for potential threats. Jane is the finch that sits on Mary’s shoulder. Jane helps Mary dress each morning, picking out her clothing and making sure she is presentable.

Mary relies on her animals for social, emotional and physical support. She needs a lot of support, because, much to Mary’s distress, the rest of the world denies the existence of Toby, Gloria and Jane. The rest of the world thinks Mary is insane and in need of help. Mary protests. She has all the help she requires from her animals.

Jane the finch is always careful, and yet the rest of the world complains when Mary turns up to work in a vest and a nightgown. Toby the rabbit is a brilliant mathematician, but somehow there is never enough money for the rent. Even fearsome Gloria cannot deal with the neighbours’ remarks about Mary’s hoard of animal food.

We each have our own realities. How do I know that this laptop, this blog and these words are logical? How do I know that they are real? Do my friends look the other way when I work on my “laptop”, when what they see is me typing away at a pencil tin? Maybe only one person sees a pencil tin. Maybe someone else sees a brick or a lump of ham. Mary’s animals are logical to her reality.

How can we condemn someone else’s reality as false when we cannot even confirm our own? How do we know that a world of nukes and assassination and starvation is more correct than one where animals speak?

The treatment for those who do not conform to our world, like Mary the schizophrenic, is usually drug therapy. A few decades ago, in the Western world, it was confinement, isolation, silencing. We locked away their physical presence because we could not bear to have them in our world. In modern society, this is no longer necessary. We have moved on, advanced. Now we lock away their mental presence. The mind that believes in talking rabbits is smothered with a mix of chemicals until it acts the way the rest of us ‘normal’ people do. The confinement is invisible, an imperceptible cage inside the mind, isolating, silencing. Not only is this effective, it is economical and morally reassuring. Economical in that society no longer has to pay for nurses, bedding or a physical cage to contain the madmen. Morally reassuring because we do not have to witness the uncomfortable madness, we can convince ourselves that it is ‘cured’.

But what if Mary wants to keep her animals? On drugs, she feels lonely. Life is empty. She has to remember how to add, subtract and find the coins to pay for groceries. Half the time she stands there, waiting for Toby to do it for her. He’s not there anymore.

In effect, these drugs remove her friends, her carers, her family; her support. Now if any of these figures were visible to general society, it would be horrendous to separate Mary from her loved ones. As it is, the act is merciful and humane.

The body without the mind is an empty shell. The way we think and what we perceive is key in personality. Anyone who is on drugs is giving up perception and thought to chemicals. Swallow and you see pigeons in tuxedos. Swallow and you are moody. Swallow and you are happy. Is it ethical for us to force them to change their personalities?

Then again, how do we help these people? While there might be slight variations in reality between you and the people to your immediate left, schizophrenics and people with other mental disorders exist in a world so removed from our own that to our perception, they are not able to function. Imagine society telling you that it is wrong to dream, that dreaming was akin to seeing dead corpses everywhere. You try to stop but you can’t. Without functionality, they may put themselves in danger, and often end up incarcerated, on the streets, or dead.

The solution today is to make it so they do function. They survive in our world at the expense of personality and free will. The question is which is more valuable?

Questions…No answers.

Why do we run out of sympathy? What is the evolutionary purpose of not wanting to try anymore, of disillusionment, of getting tired of other people being sad? I thought that when issues run for a long time, when someone hurts for a long time or when a country is in pain for decades, that it was an indication that things deteriorated and need more help than ever. Why then do we forget?

Leaving behind the weak. Tiring of altruism – giving and not receiving. Simply the limitations of empathy.

I wonder how much of evolution is relevant to our lives these days. How much, really? We move faster now, nature can’t catch up. Things are about so much more than just sex and children. What about the people who don’t want to have kids at all? Now that’s anti-evolutionary sentiment. Is it a large-scale social observation that we’re making: that we don’t need to so ardently pursue the survival of species? Is there an off-switch for instinct? At what point does the thought of ‘more children’ become one of competition and not joy? We give up parenthood and childbirth to avoid pain, disruption to our jobs and simply because it complicates things.

Marriage rates fall, divorce rates rocket. The industry of the pill, the car and media expands. Life moves so fast now. Who has much time for others when they have to think about a job – the economy – family – friends – fashion – television – money – housing – politics – internet – appearance – health – the environment – the future, the future we’re creating that will ever be harder, better, faster, stronger. The weak are left behind in pursuit of a delicate balance of all the personal complications that is one person’s life. Who has time for a beggar in the street, a boy with a broken body, a girl who talks to the air, a man who drinks himself to oblivion. Whatever the limits of compassion, it’s significant that one of the more rapidly expanding industries today is the psychology industry – where people are paid to continue to care.

I admire people who have the passion and determination to pursue good causes. I admire that they do not care about the game of “wealth” and “security” that we all seem to be caught in. However, I’m also torn between fixing what has already happened and advancing into the future. The future could mean a solution to problems of the past. It could also mean leaving them further behind. Who’s to know? Both are necessary, but where does someone decide to place themselves? How do you keep it all in balance?

I will end this abruptly because I have nothing else to write. As an utterly irrelevant conclusion:

Such happy exclusion. Sometimes, nothing hurts more than those people not even realising that they’ve injured you – because, of course, you have no reason to be hurt, do you?

America’s First Oval-Fingernail-Shape President

Dear Mr. Rudd,

I believe that today, when you described the victory of Senator Obama, your use of the quote from Martin Luther King was in poor judgement. The day that people are “not judged by the colour of their skin, but on the content of their character” has not come, and I don’t believe that this concept has been demonstrated in this election.

I would like to believe it, but whenever I turn on the television I am met with news of “America’s first black President”. Barack Obama is half white, yet we are not hearing about “America’s first half-black President” or even “America’s first half-white President”. The title is not a statement of fact, but a distortion of fact based on judgement of appearance. This may not be racism, but it is discrimination. It is recognition that the colour of Senator Obama’s skin is significant, and if this is true, it is one that may in future be turned on its head.

I believe the day that Martin Luther King described is a day where racism is as insignificant as fingernail shape. I look forward to the day where distinction based upon race is regarded as ludicrous.

Yours,
Citizen Pretzelis.