is professor of philosophy at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of Madness: A Philosophical Explor

For those who hear voices, the ‘broken brain’ explanation is harmful. Psychiatry must embrace new meaning-making frameworks

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2024-09-02 15:00:06

is professor of philosophy at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of Madness: A Philosophical Exploration (2022) and The Madness Pill: The Quest to Create Insanity and One Doctor’s Discovery that Transformed Psychiatry (St Martin’s Press, forthcoming). He also writes for Psychology Today on different paradigms of mental illness.

In November 2020, the voices came. Luca didn’t know how many there were or how they managed to force themselves into his mind.

Luca was 20. He was a musician living in London. He had taken some college courses but had to drop out to move out of his mother’s home. And now he appeared to be the target of a malicious experiment.

Over the months, he learned to distinguish the voices. There was a whole group of them, which he called ‘The Team’. The Team knew everything about him. They knew the names of his friends and family members. They knew about his musical aspirations. Sometimes they could be extremely cruel. They joked about the years of abuse he suffered under his mother – whom they named ‘Innocent’. They pretended to be his father, whom he scarcely knew. Yet they could show compassion. They celebrated his music. They promised to reveal their technologies to him. They said they would make him famous.

Eventually, the police brought Luca to a hospital against his will. A psychiatrist asked how long he had heard voices. Luca protested that he did not hear voices; he heard people. His doctors told him he was having hallucinations and delusions. They said these were symptoms of a disorder they could treat, or at least manage, with drugs.