Even people with fairly severe mental illness can function normally and make rational choices.
A friend of my family studied medicine, and during his studies there was apparently a course where the lecturer used to bring in a mental patient each year.
This specific mental patient suffered from severe delusions. He by all accounts genuinely believed he was the rightful heir of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and had constructed an elaborate fantasy world around his childhood and how he came to grow up in a suburb of Oslo, with a Norwegian family.
But here's the thing: He was in full work (I don't remember as what - a plumber or electrician or something), and lived a seemingly normal, happy life. He functioned fully as a normal member of society in every way.
He had learned and understood that, while he still believed fully in his delusions, people around him thought they were totally crazy. And so he'd accepted he had to live "undercover". He enjoyed showing up in the lecture once a year because it gave him his an opportunity to talk about what he saw as his real self.
He would debate the students at length and expand on details the asked him about with ease.
Did he not have free will?
The point of inviting him was exactly for the lecturer to point out that many forms of mental illness does not remove the patients ability to reason or their ability to function, and that often it can be hard to determine if they are mentally ill at all. What if this man was right? Nobody other than him believed so, but that doesn't prove anything. We assume he was mentally ill, but for many forms of mental illness, the line between ill or not is a fuzzy line that boils down to subjective judgement, and where the more interesting question is whether or not the patient feels there is a problem they want help with.
Of course there are mental illness where the decision is clear-cut too. But mental illness is not a binary. It's not a matter of declaring you "crazy" or "sane".
A friend of my family studied medicine, and during his studies there was apparently a course where the lecturer used to bring in a mental patient each year.
This specific mental patient suffered from severe delusions. He by all accounts genuinely believed he was the rightful heir of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and had constructed an elaborate fantasy world around his childhood and how he came to grow up in a suburb of Oslo, with a Norwegian family.
But here's the thing: He was in full work (I don't remember as what - a plumber or electrician or something), and lived a seemingly normal, happy life. He functioned fully as a normal member of society in every way.
He had learned and understood that, while he still believed fully in his delusions, people around him thought they were totally crazy. And so he'd accepted he had to live "undercover". He enjoyed showing up in the lecture once a year because it gave him his an opportunity to talk about what he saw as his real self.
He would debate the students at length and expand on details the asked him about with ease.
Did he not have free will?
The point of inviting him was exactly for the lecturer to point out that many forms of mental illness does not remove the patients ability to reason or their ability to function, and that often it can be hard to determine if they are mentally ill at all. What if this man was right? Nobody other than him believed so, but that doesn't prove anything. We assume he was mentally ill, but for many forms of mental illness, the line between ill or not is a fuzzy line that boils down to subjective judgement, and where the more interesting question is whether or not the patient feels there is a problem they want help with.
Of course there are mental illness where the decision is clear-cut too. But mental illness is not a binary. It's not a matter of declaring you "crazy" or "sane".