LTT: Amanda Evans - Psychiatric Deep Brain Stimulation and the Ethics of Mechanistic Recovery

Amanda Evans (University of Pittsburgh)

The Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh invites you to join us for our Lunch Time Talk. Attend in person at 1117 Cathedral of Learning or visit our live stream on YouTube at Dr. Amanda Evans

Friday, October 17th  @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm EST

Title: Psychiatric Deep Brain Stimulation and the Ethics of Mechanistic Recovery

Abstract: 

Direct brain interventions like deep brain stimulation (DBS) raise unique ethical questions when applied to psychiatric disorders. While frameworks like the ethical parity principle suggest that functionally equivalent processes are ethically on par, I argue this view is mistaken in the psychiatric context precisely because it overlooks a crucial distinction: that between agential recovery, guided by the patient’s reasons and values, and mechanistic recovery, which works via a process that bypasses those values. I analyze a spectrum of treatments, using DBS for Parkinson’s disease as a baseline for an agency-restoring intervention, to demonstrate how the ethical stakes shift from case to case. I argue that these stakes become highest in the decision to consent to treatments designed to compel behaviors that bypass the patient’s endorsed values, a choice at the heart of disorders of profound ambivalence such as anorexia nervosa. Ultimately, this presents a fundamental challenge to informed consent that can only be properly understood by foregrounding the ethical difference between agential and mechanistic recovery.

This talk will be available online:

Zoom: https://pitt.zoom.us/j/95825689559

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg