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?