How to reconcile agency with mental illness

Agency is relative. Can we stop breathing by choice? No. Well, a handful can but that’s not the point. Can we choose (not) to make an unprovoked attack on someone? Yes. Well, again the vast majority of us can.

The biggest joke about agency is that it just won’t go away. Theologians have debated the issue for millenia. Religion declines, and the shrinks get in on the act. And no one is none the wiser. The one thing I can argue against is the two extremes i.e. automatons vs free agents. It is just a matter of how far along that spectrum we are.

As an observer of humans, I certainly think that many of us do NOT use our free will as much as we might and are instead swept along by the currents of animal instinct and society.

I think agency is taught incorrectly in SS. We don’t have the agency to choose to do whatever we want to do, whether or not others think it’s the “right” choice. I don’t have the agency to go out tonight and run a 4 minute mile, and some people really can’t pick their chin up, get out of bed, and just get on with their day on any particular day. And trying to do what we don’t have the agency to do doesn’t work out. As Yoda said, “Do or do not, there is no try.” If you’re trying instead of doing, it’s time to go find a different approach.

I spent a number of years of my life under the delusion that I had more agency than I thought I did. “Just trying harder” did nothing to address symptoms of what I now understand to be anxiety and ADHD. Understanding exactly where I do and do not have agency has been the main “trial” in my life so far, and I’m still learning how to best work within those limitations.

I agree with many of the comments. A few comments that Reuben made about “your mind makes a decision and then lines up data to support that before you even sometimes have a chance to think about it” are reflected in a blog I posted https://wheatandtares.org/2017/02/07/the-self-righteous-mind/” class=”bbcode_url”>https://wheatandtares.org/2017/02/07/the-self-righteous-mind/

But to be honest, I go even a bit farther than some of the other comments on how much the mind is in control more than “we” individually are. Let me give a few examples just in one area of hormones.

I know of someone that was working with an endocrinologist (Dr. dealing with hormones and such). She was in her 50’s had been seeing the Dr. for a while. Suddenly after one visit she felt really odd. Everything around her turned sexual. She suddenly wanted to have sex all the time with her husband and couldn’t get enough. It was driving her crazy. She went back to the Dr. for a followup a week later and she mentioned this to the Dr. and he reviewed her chart and said, “Well – you know what it is like being a teenage boy as my assistant gave you 10X the amount of testosterone you were supposed to have received.” She said ever since then she has so much sympathy for young men.

Another was I heard someone that had a sex change operation, including full hormone treatment. They commented on the drastic change as, “I no longer believe in free will.”

Another case was covered on 20/20 back a while. Suzie Hamilton was an Olympian and a married mom. She found she was bipolar. The doctor gave her some meds to especially help with the depressive mood swings. The problem was it revved up her sex drive out of control. She left her husband and daughter because she suddenly had the insatiable drive to be a high priced Las Vegas prostitute. She just HAD TO. After she got of those meds she went back to “normal” (luckily her husband stayed with her).

And one that I can’t relate to is that of PMS. I have known nice women that grow horns once a month. A real Dr. Heckle and Mr Hyde. They are not in control of their moods as I generally am.

But having said all that, I do agree with BELIEVING you have free agency does drive one to consciously make more moral choices. I have known people that are so “what can I do, I was born into this situation and there is nothing I can do to improve it.” That frame of mind really limits a person.

EDIT: after reading this is sounds like I am really strongly pushing we don’t have any agency. That isn’t my position. I think I am pushing against the often touted (even if implicitly) that we have full agency and each of us just need to overcome our base urges and we would be perfected.

Just to give another different example. In the US we have an obesity problem that I think stems from eating too much of the wrong things, not enough exercise, and a few other factors. Before we write off our appetite as 100% terrible, I have a friend that during cancer treatment lost his sense of taste. I figured, great – you can eat all those veggies you didn’t like since it all tastes the same. I found out that this condition is considered a terminal illness that most people die within a shorter period than you think. Sure enough, my friend died within 6 months. It may have been from the cancer, but he had almost zero desire to eat anything. He was about at 50% of his pre-cancer weight. If the cancer had not ended his life, he certainly would have died from mal-nutrition shortly.

Is this free will or not?

http://nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=11811409

I almost wonder if this is getting back to the thread title. This person seems to have quite a compulsion to really be different.

I watch Music and the Spoken Word almost every Sunday. I like the music and most of the time I like the short “word.” I didn’t not like the message today but an analogy they used didn’t quite fit. The message was about choice in the face of trials or adversity, that we could choose to “harden our hearts” and become bitter, etc., or “soften our hearts” and learn from the experience, etc. The analogy was putting an egg and a potato in boiling water though. The egg will harden and the potato will soften. The thing about that object lesson is that the egg and potato don’t have a choice whether they will harden or soften, it’s what happens to them. While I agree that we do have some choice in those situations (we’ll die if put in boiling water), I don’t really agree that we have full agency in those situations because of other factors that affect us – including things like depression and other mental health issues.

Great comments have been shared.

One facet of my faith crisis is the realization of how much of my own destiny is outside of my control. I had thought that I could be smarter and work harder than the next guy to get ahead. I also paid my tithing and honored my priesthood so I had God on my side.

As a manager, employees would sometimes come into my office to complain about a supervisor or coworker that was “driving them crazy” or “making them mad”. I had a copy of victor frankl’s book in my office and I would sometimes read to them the following quote:

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

I had heard this quote used in church and GC repeatedly. If people living in Nazi concentration camps were free to choose their own attitude then individuals with difficult supervisors or coworkers must have the same choice.

I imagine I was not very helpful to the people that came to talk to me.

LDS dominant doctrine/culture is heavy on the agency side of the coin. Everyone must have the ability to choose in order to be judged. We are agents to act and “not to be acted upon” 2 Ne. 2:26

Elder Bednar believes in Agency so much as to say:

it ultimately is impossible for another person to offend you or to offend me. Indeed, believing that another person offended us is fundamentally false. To be offended is a choice we make; it is not a condition inflicted or imposed upon us by someone or something else.

In the grand division of all of God’s creations, there are things to act and things to be acted upon (see 2 Nephi 2:13–14). As sons and daughters of our Heavenly Father, we have been blessed with the gift of moral agency, the capacity for independent action and choice. Endowed with agency, you and I are agents, and we primarily are to act and not just be acted upon. To believe that someone or something can make us feel offended, angry, hurt, or bitter diminishes our moral agency and transforms us into objects to be acted upon. As agents, however, you and I have the power to act and to choose how we will respond to an offensive or hurtful situation.

It lead President Packer to say:

“Some suppose that they were pre-set and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn tendencies toward the impure and unnatural. Not so! Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone? Remember he is our father.”

I must not judge them too harshly. I was in their shoes and I gave much the same counsel. I felt that my positive choices were like deposits in a federally insured bank account. They were a blanket of security for me and gave structure and purpose to my life.

Now, post FC, I look back at the Victor Frankl quote. I do believe that humans can be capable of incredible things – but that does not necessarily mean that those that were not so exceptional were just not trying or pushing themselves hard enough. It can be like saying that Michael Phelps exists – so that means that everyone can be Michael Phelps. Maybe most were dealing with horrific circumstances in the best way that they knew how.

Thanks, everyone.

Agency is one’s ability to choose what to do. It varies in extent from person to person – and we teach that people will not be condemned for things they can’t control – areas where they aren’t completely free.

Do you think that the fact that individuals possess different amounts of agency contradicts scripture? Or is there a way to reconcile it against scriptures like these?:

2 Ne 10:23, “…ye are free to act for yourselves–to choose the way of everlasting death or the way of eternal life.”

Helaman 14:30-31, “…whosoever perisheth, perisheth unto himself; and whosoever doeth iniquity, doeth it unto himself; for behold, ye are free; ye are permitted to act for yourselves; for behold, God hath given unto you a knowledge and he hath made you free. He hath given unto you that ye might know good from evil, and he hath given unto you that ye might choose life or death; and ye can do good and be restored unto that which is good, or have that which is good restored unto you; or ye can do evil, and have that which is evil restored unto you.”

D&C 58:27-8, “…men should be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and do many things of their own free will, and bring to pass much righteousness; For the power is in them, wherein they are agents unto themselves.”

D&C 93:30-32, “All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence. Behold, here is the agency of man, and here is the condemnation of man; because that which was from the beginning is plainly manifest unto them, and they receive not the light. And every man whose spirit receiveth not the light is under condemnation.”

Agency is relative. Can we stop breathing by choice? No.

I don’t have the agency to go out tonight and run a 4 minute mile…

Good point. No one, it seems, possesses a fullness of agency.

As an observer of humans, I certainly think that many of us do NOT use our free will as much as we might and are instead swept along by the currents of animal instinct and society.

I’d like to think that’s true, also. Does more diligent adherence to Gospel principles increase our ability to exercise our free will, do you think?

For example, with bipolar…the person’s thinking may be impaired. That may make them impossible to deal with, and the person with bipolar can’t see it to choose to think differently about things. […] But they have a choice to fight against others trying to help them, or give in and accept the help and try to have a fairly normal life.

They might have a choice to fight versus give in…or they might not. But it sounds like you’re saying that even when some degree of agency is stripped from us, we still (arguably) have some degree of agency remaining, and that is the portion by which we are judged. That would be fair. And maybe we have to also grant that there may be some whose physiology is so thoroughly messed up that they literally have zero agency. (For some reason, severe lead poisoning comes to mind.) I wonder whether there are more of those cases than we tend to acknowledge. I just feel like in the church we’re all under the assumption that, granting a few obvious exceptions, different people kind of all have the same capacity for agency. Do you think so? Maybe that’s just my misperception.

But, I believe our faith in the Atonement is that God makes up for the difference and so it becomes a level playing field for all.

This makes me think of the Parable of the Prodigal Son differently. Maybe the dad in that story knew that his younger son had an issue of some sort that prevented him from making the good choices that the older son made. That story always really bugged me as a young kid, because I was the oldest and the one who seemed to get punished when my younger siblings would get away with murder, haha. But if I’m honest, I think one of my younger brothers had mental and physical issues that actually did prevent him from doing what he should as easily as I could, and he was entitled to those “free passes.”

I spent a number of years of my life under the delusion that I had more agency than I thought I did. “Just trying harder” did nothing to address symptoms of what I now understand to be anxiety and ADHD. Understanding exactly where I do and do not have agency has been the main “trial” in my life so far, and I’m still learning how to best work within those limitations.

I have had very similar experiences, and now look back and realize the degree to which much of that effort seems wasted. It is so hard to figure out where our agency begins and ends!

Psychological studies have found that people will defend decisions they didn’t actually make if they thought they made those decisions. This suggests a model of decision-making where decisions are made subconsciously, and one purpose of conscious thought is to explain them.

Mindfulness and meditation have been shown to change basic desires and emotional states. (Most of the research has focused on reducing negative effects such as anxiety and intrusive thoughts.) This suggests that another purpose of conscious thought is to alter patterns of subconscious thought.

Cool studies! The results make me think that, even if 99% of our behavior is automatic, subconscious, performed on autopilot, the fact that conscious thought can influence and shift unconscious thought makes me believe that our agency consists of our ability to use the 1% to influence the 99%. I definitely notice that when I consciously select, for example, a book among hundreds at the library in which the characters are amazing/inspiring, that I’m often able to act a little bit more like those characters for a little while afterwards, without any noticeable effort on my part.

Is this free will or not?

http://nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=11811409

I think we cannot possibly know.

This quote is about judgment, which is slightly off topic, but I think it relates because when we talk agency it’s often tied with how we’ll be judged by god or others.

… While one portion of the human race is judging and condemning the other without mercy, the Great Parent of the universe looks upon the whole of the human family with a fatherly care and paternal regard; He views them as His offspring, and without any of those contracted feelings that influence the children of men, causes ‘His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.’ He holds the reins of judgment in His hands; He is a wise Lawgiver, and will judge all men, not according to the narrow, contracted notions of men, but, ‘according to the deeds done in the body whether they be good or evil,’ or whether these deeds were done in England, America, Spain, Turkey, or India. He will judge them, ‘not according to what they have not, but according to what they have’; those who have lived without law, will be judged without law, and those who have a law, will be judged by that law. We need not doubt the wisdom and intelligence of the Great Jehovah; He will award judgment or mercy to all nations according to their several deserts, their means of obtaining intelligence, the laws by which they are governed, the facilities afforded them of obtaining correct information, and His inscrutable designs in relation to the human family; and when the designs of God shall be made manifest, and the curtain of futurity be withdrawn, we shall all of us eventually have to confess that the Judge of all the earth has done right.

What a beautiful quote. Thanks. So, clearly, Joseph Smith understood that agency is limited for many, if not for everyone, on this earth.

The message was about choice in the face of trials or adversity, that we could choose to “harden our hearts” and become bitter, etc., or “soften our hearts” and learn from the experience, etc. The analogy was putting an egg and a potato in boiling water though. The egg will harden and the potato will soften. The thing about that object lesson is that the egg and potato don’t have a choice whether they will harden or soften, it’s what happens to them.

Yes, sometimes we are more egg than potato, despite wanting and trying with all our hearts to be the potato.

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Yes, Roy, I completely agree! The problem with the Frankl quote is that it’s not universally true. How I wish it were. We’d like it to be, because it means there is at least a little power within each of us that cannot be taken, and that’s a comforting thought. And it may have been true for at least some of those employees. But after the experiences I’ve had over the past 2 years, I think it’s possible for even the last vestiges of power to be stripped from a person, if their suffering reaches a certain threshold; effort ceases to be part of the equation – the ability to exert any type of effort or will is nonexistent in the midst of the excruciating physical or mental suffering. Perhaps some of those who were able to give bread away in NAZI concentration camps were experiencing a lesser degree of suffering in their frozen and starved state than others. We cannot know. But we’d be wrong to assume that all those who were in despair in the camps could have chosen a better attitude.

Similarly, if Elder Bednar thought about it a bit harder, he might change his mind about being offended being a choice, universally. Certainly it is a choice in many cases, but who is to say in what % of cases? And we could also argue that that contradicts Matt 18:6 when it says, “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones…” (Although that’s maybe just a KJV semantics issue.) I can’t even…President Packer. :silent: But I wonder how they each would respond to your Michael Phelps analogy.

A few more thoughts:

My 25-year-old brother-in-law is severely autistic, basically non-verbal. He is cognitively at the level of a 2-year-old. My in-laws chose not to have him baptized, and some extended family disagreed with that choice, but I support them. How can he make covenants that he doesn’t understand? If you asked him if he wanted to be baptized, he would probably say yes, but it would probably be because he likes swimming and water. He likes the hymns and he likes to pray (with someone prompting him on what to say) but he shows no understanding at all of hypothetical constructs, so it’s doubtful that he understands the Gospel anything like an average 8-year-old would. But that made me think how much 8-year-olds differ in their various capacities to understand the covenants they’re making, and how adults differ in their capacity to understand temple covenants. Yet, these are choices that we’re taught have eternal weight attached.

I have a lot of friends who are Evangelical Christians because of the area in which we live, and because we homeschool and lots of Evangelicals homeschool, too. Their Christianity is the grace-based flavor, while ours is a combination of grace and works. Do you think a more grace-based Christianity, in which salvation depends on belief in Christ independent of your actual behavior, solves this agency problem? It seems to, in my mind. And I often think that if we are truly looking to Christ that our behavior will take care of itself; it will automatically be as perfect as it can be, given environmental constraints. So why in LDS theology is there such a heavy emphasis on agency?

I fully agree with Reuben and LookingHard that even if we don’t have agency, it is to our advantage to believe that we do. I actually gave a presentation with that very thesis in a Sociology class, once. The idea was pushed hard all semester that minorities and women in our society do not hold the same level of power held by white men. While that may be statistically accurate, spending much time/energy internalizing that on an individual level could hamper the ability of some women/minorities to reach their full potential.

While my mom was growing up, her dad became an alcoholic, her parents got divorced, and the whole situation really messed her up. As an adult she found books about the traits commonly found in adult children of alcoholics, and she related to them. She felt good having finally found explanations for some of her imperfections that she had long felt made her a bad person. I understand that there can be comfort in knowing that negative traits or poor behavior may be rooted in genes or environment that we couldn’t control. But even if I have certain traits because of my genes or because of my parents/childhood, I like to believe that I have a lot of power to change those things about myself that I don’t like. I recognize that I might be deluding myself, but I feel like if I maintain the delusion, I’m more likely to be able to change things than if I just accept those negative traits. It is a point my mom and I butt heads about periodically.