From left to right: Dr. Charles Scott, Dr. Kate Warburton, Dr. Jhilam Biswas, Dr. Stephen Stahl, and Father Alberto Carrara at the American Psychiatric Association’s Annual Meeting.
Members of our board took part in the American Psychiatric Association’s Annual Meeting, where they engaged in discussions on improving interventions for schizophrenia to help prevent severe outcomes. Following the session, many attendees joined board members at a reception to continue conversations around the topic and learn about ICONN’s broader mission. Later that afternoon, board members visited sites in Los Angeles to gain deeper insight into the homelessness situation, the incarceration of individuals with mental illness, and the existing programs to address these issues. Below is an excerpt from Father Carrara’s presentation at the APA and a Call to Action.
Treatment is not coercion. It is restoration. The stratification of freedom tells us where intervention is not only justified, but ethically imperative. To withhold care until ‘consent’ re-emerges is to abandon the patient to disintegration. That is not ethics. That is abandonment dressed up in autonomy. - Father Alberto Carrara, The Vatican
Dr. Stephen Stahl and Dr. Takesha Cooper engaging with participants at ICONN’s Reception
A neuroethical call to action
Schizophrenia is not just a clinical challenge. It is a mirror held up to our ethical systems. Neuroethics, as we understand it, is the discipline that forces us to look into that mirror—not to despair, but to reconstruct the moral architecture of care.
Let us no longer be complicit in a system that calls neglect autonomy and calls abandonment compassion. Let us instead build neuroethically informed pathways of care—where neuroscience guides us not only toward what is possible, but toward what is just.
In the layered ruins of disintegrated consciousness, we must place not blame, but bridges—bridges back to autonomy, to relationality, to dignity.
Because every person with schizophrenia is not a broken machine. They are a stratified, wounded freedom calling out—quietly, incoherently, perhaps even violently—for a chance to be restored.
That is our task. That is our responsibility. That is our human obligation.
- Father Alberto Carrara