Autonomy in Mood Disorders
Today's post is by Elliot Porter. Elliot is a political philosopher. His research examines autonomy and abnormal psychology, focusing particularly on affective disorders. During his MSc he sat as the student Mental Health Officer on Glasgow University 's Students’ Representative Council, and the university’s Disability Equality Group. He currently sits as a member of a Research Ethics Committee in Glasgow, which approves medical research for the Health Research Authority . It is widely thought that serious mental disorder can injure a person's autonomy. Beauchamp and Childress list mental disorder among the controlling influences that render a person non-autonomous. Neither Raz nor Dworkin allow their theories to conclude that people with mental disorder are in fact autonomous. Happily, recent research tends not to take mental disorder as a homogeneous phenomenon, in favour of examining different disorders and symptoms individually. Lisa Bortolotti ...