Posted on December 15, 2025.
Neither my family nor my region of birth have I had the power to choose. Neither have my parents, nor has anyone else. Neither have our human minds had any say in the strange conflict that led to their emergence. That is, although the mind absorbs the unrestrained impacts of its environment without a choice, it's somehow ensured that it has any freedom over its choices, aka free will.
Will this idea of freedom ever widen, as it hinges on the passing of time? No free will at all in prehistoric times. As soon as writing systems emerged later, had we just learned to communicate with conscious decision? It's centuries ahead of now that we'll be controlling even our bodily perception of pain, becoming actors of eternal happiness. Even if the common view on the meaning of life will be that of existential nihilism, our interpretations won't be as pessimistic as we claim now. Masses of suicides we commit, but no individual one feels painful or even originates from pain. We recall the dinosaurs and imagine this evolution theory, revisionist history, and foretold prophecy.
Holding that any action is driven by mental processes that precede it, like thinking and decision, this essay reflects on the presence of free will, starting with a commentary on psychiatry as a point of departure.
In case you have fractured your mind, psychiatry has proceeded a long path in defining mental health disorders, symptoms, and diagnostic criteria. As a branch of medicine, it explores the neurochemistry of the brain, with a passion to locate the origin of disorders therein.
First, we must realize that any science, including psychiatry, comes with a speculative, subjective remark on the silent nature. For medicine, this means that no body part, on its own, exclaims, "I'm disordered," to doctors. It's merely human assessment to pathologize - to signify what in the body constitutes a disease, disorder, or malfunction.
Physical disorders, when untreated, might lead to the continuous self-destruction of the body, verifying the patient suffers because of their physiological condition. Mental disorders, on the other hand, rely exceptionally on a client's relation to society at large and their emotional state that manifests an interruption of specific norms, like in personal routines and expected social interactions. For example, sinusitis corresponds to a blocked nose, green or yellow mucus, pain around one's forehead, and so on. In contrast, autism is characterized by symptoms including little eye contact, repetitive behaviors, and obsessive interests. The former breaks a biological norm within a single body, but the latter, a social one.
Unlike the static nature of other medical branches, the list of psychiatric disorders has changed vividly over time - from homosexuality and female hysteria to the proposed sadistic personality disorder. In psychiatric assessments, first is an observation of non-conformity in a client's behavior, and only second is an excuse for this judgement to have its grounds in biology. Likewise, psychiatry presents a lack of interest in the biological basis to socially acceptable behavior because such an examination is reserved for those deemed abnormal at first sight.
Because it's a scientific observation, the biological foundation to a client's subjective experience is unlikely to be a falsehood. As though the client were excluded from the rest of the human species, however, why is such a biological discovery of the mind and behavior pronounced only for the condition of the few? One impression of this attention gap is that either those with better mental health have no material minds, or those with mental health conditions are material non-humans. What ensures that the mentally healthy population will not be dealing with said conditions in the future - to claim their unusual distinction from the sufferers? Of course, the reliance on social norms overweighs our shared biological profile.
Despite the objectivity of its biological findings, psychiatry presumes the dominant view of society, operates on a specific truth of reality and morality, and marks outlier insights and behaviors as disturbances.
Supposedly, a psychotic person is characterized by their detachment from reality. With hallucinations as a symptom, psychiatry claims that sense data is perhaps our primary method of interaction with reality - but that the extracted knowledge only needs fixing for the few. However, has the mentally healthy population ever perceived reality in a single, universal, objective way? Without much thought, psychosis alone should be sufficient to suggest that perception is at odds with an objective truth of reality. "My so-called hallucinations are truly perceived, hence real," screams the client. "You're hallucinating with a false perception of reality," insists the psychiatrists, as though they were the bearers of truth, making the same statements secluded in their own perception of reality.
Supposedly, there are ten personality disorders divided into three clusters. If we paid attention to each disorder, what a surprising variety of biological disfigurations under a single title! In the meanwhile, why does each symptom happen to describe behavior out of the norm? Implicitly, there are universal, set rules for the manner that a person should behave in, and their otherwise actions perhaps alarm the need for treatment. If the human self refers to the mind and personality, are they “broken” people that should be stripped of their authenticity?
While psychiatry institutionally reinforces a regulation on normality by framing certain behavior as disordered, mental health conditions should be treated as neither an internal problem nor an outlier, surprising case. Indeed, it is the threat of poverty, discrimination at the workplace, surviving domestic abuse, and inevitable social conditioning that medicalize many people. In line with the concept of cultural hegemony, social norms are predisposed to reflect the interests of the ruling class and also, the reproduction of the masculinity ideal. Likewise, the widespread stigma around mental illness presents no surprise.
While helping us cope with our negative feelings, a psychiatrist must not soothe our revolutionary rage but point out where our pain is rooted in - a patriarchal, capitalist structure of society. Instead of representing an infighting between those who can and cannot adapt to the system, a psychiatrist's office should aim at healing and raising consciousness in the sufferers. That is, if only everyone could afford quality therapy in the first place.
A final question to divert our attention! Who, out of every possible behavior that conforms to society, every possible willpower to prevent thoughts that spawn fear and angst, and every possible action to thrive in happiness, would make the decision to have a mental health disorder and deal with the psychiatric categorization that marks their suffering? Broken without a choice.
Anxiety disorders, depression, personality disorders, schizophrenia... At least, psychiatry lends a shoulder to cry on, "You're feeling the way you are because of a hyperactive amygdala. / Your brain is short of dopamine. / You were traumatized by violent abuse in your past." Fortunately, it doesn't complain, "Don't participate in society! Don't be traumatized! Control your brain structure! Don't be mentally ill!" as if you had the chance.
Highlighting the culpability of chemical disfiguration in the clients, psychiatry verifies that the material interactions in the brain translate to a person's thoughts and actions. Regarding the helplessness of sufferers, who would choose not to suffer otherwise, we can see a negation of our free will. If you can't modify your chemical interactions in command, if you can't stop your heart from beating at the thought of it, then why would you be able to control your actions? Further, don't your heart rate, hormones, and bodily sensations shadow your mental processes?
Another case worth attention is psychiatric drugs. Unless they're blessed with a playfully healing magic, they're also nothing more than chemical compositions. Once you take them regularly, don't they regulate your emotions, modify your thoughts, and change your "sick" habits eventually? To produce such a change, the only path a chemical can take is by its interaction with other chemicals, which correspond to the material nature of the mind.
Unless we accept the existence of an immaterial, external agent that influences the thought material despite the efforts of applied psychiatry, never has matter travelled a journey of undetermined freedom. In the face of this materiality and responsiveness that directs actions, how can we speak of free will?
After all the arguments against free will, one inevitable question persists: if free will is not real, then why does its thought appear in the mind? While the arrival of a thought in one's mind does not necessitate its truth, such a question is nevertheless worth an answer.
Free will is a product of the human mind that imagines it has the tiniest control over its actions to delude itself against the potential state of suffering that it can perceive in the future. Having no control of our perception of pain while consistently desiring its avoidance, it's a tragedy that we suffer in the first place. At the same time, the mind itself has never chosen to hold this capacity of perception that we consciously sense. Choice is a false invention of the human mind that also fails to apply to itself.
Moral responsibility, however, alerts a response in the mind that makes it reevaluate its decisions because of its socially constructed value that we have internalized. Epistemically, free will is an illusion, so it's false that moral responsibility exists. Pragmatically, even the false assumption of free will is able to reduce our suffering by leading to a change in both internal and external actors that cause pain. With moral claims, we now express desires and dissatisfaction, in response to the current conditions that we suffer from.
Another means to manage painful actors is to abolish the conditions that lead to their occurrence. Without free will, it becomes more remarkable that people aren't born evil but that they're a product of social conditioning in a disordered society. Finally, this absence can drive us motivation to understand what conditions cause specific behavior, recalling psychoanalytic models.
In summary, this essay attempts to reveal the implications of psychiatry by highlighting the definition and diagnosis of mental health disorders. As we realize the presence of neurobiological findings pertaining to the mind and behavior, then emerges a discussion on free will and the case for moral responsibility.
I realized that, writing this entry, a state of dissociation had disturbed me at times. Likely, it was the cognitive effort of questioning my own free will that would trigger such a reaction, but haven't we gone so far through our lives without free will and the awareness of its absence?
All the words I've written, all my decisions, all my value judgments - each determined, a response to a previous state, a discernment of the route to change. We oscillate between illusions.