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 a few centuries 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.
In a hypothetical scenario where a client has the strange modifications in their brain that relate to their mental health but manifests no behavioral symptoms outwards, would they be given a diagnosis? In addition to the changing list of disorders over time, it seems that, for psychiatric assessments, the observed non-conformity in the client's behavior comes first, and second is an excuse for this judgement to have its grounds in biology. In contrast, psychiatry presents a lack of interest in the biological basis to socially acceptable behavior because such an examination would be reserved for those who were deemed "abnormal" at first sight.
Of course, the biological foundation to the subjective experience of a client is not a falsehood, as scientifically observed. As though the client were excluded from the rest of the human species, why is such a biological discovery, of the mind and behavior, emphasized almost only for the condition of the few that are deemed to be mentally disordered? 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 won't be dealing with those conditions in the future, to claim their unusual distinction from the sufferers? Despite the objectivity of its bodily findings, psychiatry operates on a specific truth of reality and morality, presumes the dominant view of society, and marks outlier insights and behaviors as disturbances.
Supposedly, a psychotic person is characterized by their detachment from reality. However, has there ever been a single, universal, objective way that the mentally healthy population perceives reality - to speak of detachment from? Psychosis alone should be sufficient to prove that human 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 while also making those remarks secluded in their own perception of reality.
Supposedly, there are ten personality disorders divided into three clusters. Why do the symptoms of each one describe behavior out of the norm? Are there universally set rules for the manner a person should behave in, and otherwise, they need treatment? If the self refers to the mind and personality, aren't they "broken" people?
Although psychiatry reinforces a regulation on normality by pointing out abnormal behavior according to its standards, mental health conditions should be treated as neither an internal problem nor an outlier, surprising case. In a coercive society that is structured for the profit of the rich and around the norms of masculinity, it is the threat of poverty, discrimination at the workplace, surviving domestic abuse, and inevitable social conditioning that medicalize many people. 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 an infighting between those who can and cannot adapt to this system, a psychiatrist's office should represent a place aimed at healing and raising consciousness in the sufferers.
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?
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, people aren't born evil, but 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.
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.