Free Will Beliefs and Psychiatry

I was just contacted by a psychiatrist in Turkey who wants to translate The Free Will Inventory into Turkish for some research he is planning to conduct. His work is based on this piece he sent me:

Weisman de Mamani AG, Gurak K, Maura J, Martinez de Andino A, Weintraub MJ and Mejia MG. Free Will Perceptions and Psychiatric Symptoms in Patients with Schizophrenia. J Schizophr Res. 2015;2(2): 1011.

 

Download Fulltext-schizophrenia-v2-id1011

 

Here is the abstract:

This pilot study is the first to examine the relationship between free will perceptions and psychiatric symptoms in 32 patients with schizophrenia. Participants were interviewed using the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale to assess  symptom severity and the Free Will Subscale of the Free Will and Determinism Scale to assess free will perceptions. As hypothesized, a moderately strong association was found between greater free will perceptions and less severe total psychiatric symptoms. When examining symptoms broken down into positive, negative, and affective type, it appears that the relationship was only significant for positive symptoms. While the associations for negative symptoms and affective were in the expected direction, the effect sizes were small and nonsignificant. A content analysis was also conducted to examine qualitatively how patients conceptualize the construct of free will and its role in coping with their own mental illness. Most patients (74.1%) appeared to endorse at least some degree of free will in managing their illness. At first pass, results of this study suggest that holding a free will perspective may mitigate psychiatric symptoms in patients with schizophrenia. However, it is possible that less severe symptoms lead to a greater sense of free will. Future longitudinal research is needed to replicate the link between free will and psychiatric symptoms and to clarify the direction of the associations.

It is an interesting pilot study--even though they used a scale for measuring free will beliefs that we criticize in our paper on The Free Will Inventory (namely, the Free Will and Determinism scale by Rakos et al.). Minimally, this is more fodder for thought for those who are interested in the psychological and practical upshots of believing in free will (whether good or bad).

p.s. On a related note, I have been working with a team for the past few years to develop a Portuguese version of FWI. We have finally validated the scale--which provides some preliminary evidence that the beliefs picked out by the scale may be cross-culturally stable. We should have a write up (in English) of our efforts and findings soon. In the meantime, let me know if you're interested in translating, administering, and validating FWI in another language!

Comments

[Brian]

The notion of free will is problematic, generally. Unless coerced, we all generally feel free in covert and overt activity. A scale for free will interpretations of symptoms seems a particularly dangerous concept. If one believes that symptoms are chosen, then the natural extension would be that the person chose the disability. If the symptoms are occasionally chosen, then the individual must occasionally be choosing to be disabled. Beyond the illogic of such positions is the side effect that others would blame a person for a disability (or the symptoms of the disability) if it was believed that the person chooses the express those symptoms. This is not only flawed, but is not likely to lead to compassionate responses.