Loss of Control and Phenomenology in Psychotic Disorders

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Any insights we can hope to gain with respect to what is going on with our mental lives and our agency will almost certainly require a close examination of the "worst-case scenarios", since it is when things break down that the joints of the phenomena are revealed. This is a philosophical intuition of mine that pervades everything I work on, and the papers that make up this dissertation are no exception. In keeping with this guiding sentiment, this dissertation tackles three philosophical issues related to the so-called "loss of control" that occurs in mental disorder, and it does so in a way that places the phenomenology of agency at the forefront in some way or other. In my first paper on the sense of agency in anorexia nervosa (AN), I try to resolve an apparent discrepancy between the phenomenology of anorexics in the grip of their disorder and the psychological and neurological data that purport to describe what they are undergoing. I provide a solution to this apparent incongruency by offering an account of the sense of agency in AN that grants sincerity to anorexic testimony while also being able to explain why the relevant experiences of agency come to be illusory. Then, in my second paper, I broaden my scope to include not just AN but also substance use disorder (SUD).