The Ethical Conundrum of Medicalizing Self-control: An Examination of Addiction, Obesity, and ADHD
2023 Lecturer Steven E. Hyman, MD
Medical schools, the physicians they graduate, and public health officials are appropriately concerned with human behaviors that affect risk of morbidity and mortality. Unfortunately, to a great extent, medical education and medical practice remain mired in folk psychological rather than scientific understandings of decision-making and self-control. Thus, views of people suffering from such conditions as drug addiction, obesity, and conditions that impair executive function often lurch between the extremes of moral opprobrium and fatalistic biological determinism. Failure to engage wisely with our advancing, albeit still incomplete scientific understanding of behavioral control is not only damaging to public health, but represents an ethical failure on the part of medical educators and practitioners that contribute to distress and poor outcomes for patients.
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Steven E. Hyman, MD is a Core Institute Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research. He is also Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and Harald McPike Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology.
From 2001 to 2011 Hyman served as Provost (chief academic officer) of Harvard University. From 1996 to 2001 he served as Director of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), where he invested in neuroscience and emerging genomic technologies and initiated a series of large clinical effectiveness trials to inform practice. He has served as Editor of the Annual Review of Neuroscience (2002-2016), founding President of the International Neuroethics Society (2008-2013), President of the Society for Neuroscience (2015), and President of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (2018). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a distinguished life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM). At the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine he has served on the NAM Council (2012-2018), on the Governing Board of the National Research Council (2016-2019) and chaired the National Academies’ Forum on Neuroscience and Nervous System Disorders (2012-2018). He is currently a member of the Committee on Science, Technology, and the Law (CSTL). He chairs the Boards of Directors of the Charles A. Dana Foundation (NY) and the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering (Geneva, Switzerland), and is a Director of Annual Reviews Inc (Palo Alto). He received his BA, summa cum laude, from Yale, an MA from the University of Cambridge, which he attended as a Mellon fellow studying History and Philosophy of Science, and an MD, cum laude, from Harvard Medical School.