The Final Cure

Image- doctor tomograph study by valeopardo, source pixabay, processed using Adobe Spark.

Eugenics, Dysgenics, and Neoliberalism

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For the longest time, the “cure” argument was about treating mental illness as a disease versus a cognitive variant of the human species. For some time, these two models had been at professional odds, with the disease model winning most political and social arguments. This was because some psychiatric disorders had behaviors that were disruptive to society if left untreated. Helping to shape this argument were the big pharma corporations who had a vested interest in the off-label use of drugs.

What arose out of the cognitive variant arguments was the concept of being self-proclaimed or self-diagnosed, and one’s cognitive variants create one’s identity. Historically, one self-advocate group, that followed such arguments, managed to change the definition of a disorder with the APA during a revision of the DSM. An impressive feat of lobbying by such an organization when most lobbying is guided by Big Pharma interests through a series of controlled studies.

The social changes in psychiatry into one where mental illness was not only a disease to be treated, but one to be eradicated took a long time to occur in Rosella’s world. It required a social and political shift on a near global scale in the people. It included the use of artificial intelligence to sift through the vast amounts of data and the intervention of improved reproductive technologies. Its impetus was the ongoing burdens of long-term care of the most severe patients in society.

Before the CBHM, and Sawa Kaneko and Ei Yoshimi’s discovery of genetic micro-deletions for mental disorders, there was the National Organization of Genetic Psychology through A.I. Research (NOGP-AIR). A congressionally established organization and placed under the operational control of the OSTP. Its reporting would be under the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

Science had known for a long time that many of the mental health disorders had a genetic link or relationship. This was especially true for disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. Also known were some disorders with associations with genetic diseases, such as Angelman syndrome or Rett syndrome.
Thus, the organization was tasked with the gathering and sorting of all available genetic information to find clues to specific alleles changes that may be related to psychological disorders when compared to “normative individuals.” It was to use the latest in deep learning and A.I. technology to determine this.

This was a bi-partisan effort, despite the public posturing of key party members. The rising aging levels of such disorders as autism and schizophrenia were costing America too much in social welfare. The same was occurring in many other nations, and their leaders were very interested in the outcomes of the NOGP-AIR project. Both US political parties knew cutbacks had to be made, and if couples could use genetic testing to identify those who will have these disorders, then they could be better informed with amniocentesis creating potential future government savings.

Before this point, many scientists and advocates kept saying they had no clue what was “the cause” of many of these disorders and “there can’t be a cure.” So, despite genes being identified as connected to various disorders, any use of abortion after identifying an unborn through amniocentesis would be seen as a eugenic use.

What NOGP-AIR discovered through the gathering, sorting, and processing of countless numbers of sourced human genomes, with and without mental illness, was that there were constellation patterns of specific genetic mutations associated with various mental illnesses. Some of these constellation patterns aligned with observed variances in behaviours that required higher degrees of social welfare and interventions.

Once this information became public, a firestorm erupted in the mental health community. The self-advocates and various supportive psychologists were alarmed by what was being suggested, coining the term, “The Final Cure” from the old Nazi program called “The Final Solution.”

On the other side were medical professionals and psychologists backed by a coalition of anti-tax and neoliberal political action committees seeking to lower the government’s burdens. This group ran very sophisticated ads on the internet, social media, and television that made convincing arguments for a cost-efficient government, the end to social ills such as poverty and homelessness, healthier family structures, and the use of new reproductive technologies to cure diseases.

The self-advocate side took to the streets in protest marches, trying to gather free publicity through news coverage. After these marches took place, a few self-advocate groups supported the dysgenics use of the same technologies they claimed were supportive of state paid eugenics, to increase the number of those with mental disorders. These groups came under attack by conservative and neoliberals as being hypocritical.
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The social damage caused by the small number of self-advocate groups supporting dysgenic ideologies was enough to push most people into the eugenics. Not that these people were full blown Nazi supporters, but they preferred a society where a couple’s choice was preserved to what kind of family they wanted, and that such a family shouldn’t be a burden on society.

​This new neoliberalism view of the family, a non-social burdening couple’s choice, had taken root and became adopted on a global scale. Some saw it to control population growth and others saw it to improve government spending, all the while providing the human couple freedom of choice.

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Links to Other Posts about Mental Health
The Committee for Better Mental Health (CBMH)
Mental Illness During Rosella’s Time
Rosella Tolfree’s World – Important Historical People Pt 1

A Rosella World Psychological Stories
Dawn Mason’s Extreme Hatred Bias
The Story of Thomas Finley