Psycho-Pass: Utopia or Dystopia?

The basic premise of Psycho-Pass isn’t that hard: Japanese society has progressed to the point where a mental health evaluation is possible within fractions of a second. This has lead to it reaching a point where these evaluations are not just used in dating to show how “stable” one is, but also in law-enforcement. I recommend the show, and if you plan on watching it, please do so before continuing to read.

You’re a latent criminal

One of the core ideas is that law-enforcement can assign every person a score on how likely they are to commit a crime. Got a score of 200 or higher? Well, that’s not good. You’ve successfully lost your position in society and are thus subject to “enforcement”. This means the Public Safety Bureau might show up, knock you out, and forcefully bring you to therapy. Independent on whether or not you have actually done a wrong. If you are deemed dangerous or your crime coefficient is over 300, your guts may instead be sprinkled all over the room and your potential to become a criminal will be permanently reduced to zero through more drastic means.

The following are my thoughts on this practice as someone who has been admitted to a psych-ward and was released as “unstable”.

Living in a society of stigma

While the idea of “seeking help” in our society is slowly gaining traction and an understanding for the importance of mental health is increasingly widespread. That’s good. Like… no notes. Just good. And yet, here comes the “but”: despite that there is still regular “advice” along the lines of “just smile more”, “have you tried going outside”, or “have you tried doing sports”. I won’t deny that in some light cases that might help, but if the person you’re talking to is beyond the most basic level of depression, this is absolutely counterproductive. Rubbing their inability to function in will not get them out of depression, it will achieve the opposite.

Going to therapy is a stigma. Go to an interview for a job and let them know out of the gate that you’re currently getting treated for depression, anxiety, or whatever. Congratulations, you’ve just made it way down on the list of potential hires.

Psycho-Pass has taken this to the extreme where there can be outright discrimination based on your “hue”¹. This – obviously – is also bad. But I argue less so than a subtle discrimination. This is a clearer motivation to seek out therapy, even if fucked up.

Therapy is not optional

To get put into therapy by force, you have to either be a danger to yourself or others. That makes sense. Imagine being ripped out of your regular life just to be put into confinement, without having done something wrong. I feel obligated to say it: Therapy is not bad. While I may question aspects of its efficacy in how we approach it today, that has no bearing on whether or not it is a net-benefit for the people in it. Therapy against the patients will, doesn’t really work though, so the Psycho-Pass approach of just taking them in might be relatively ineffective.

With some types of disorders, it might even lead to an entirely different outcome, that would be less preferential: Suicide by Cop. One of the reasons this is a relatively rare thing is that (contrary to what some would say) it is actually pretty hard to get police to fire at you with the intent to kill.

What does it mean to have agency?

The issue of if people may or may not be forced to therapy and, by extension, life is a question I have contemplated myself quite a lot. Is it moral to force someone to live against their will? Even if we hope that most will reach the point where they do not wish to end it, it remains a fact that some just wish for their suffering to end. This is a discussion that needs to happen in society and the answer is probably somewhere between required check-in to the looney bin and just being turned into human mince because the tests indicate that you might not be able to be rehabilitated. Does a right to be free of bodily harm include a right to inflict bodily harm to oneself? Similar to how a right to freely choose one’s religion necessitates to not be religious. This is left as an exercise to the reader and I seriously doubt that there is one answer everyone can agree on.

Overall, beyond the two seasons, the movie, and the visual novel, Psycho-Pass made me think… I recommend all of these media to you and hope it does the same to you. Recommended Order: S1 → Film → S2 → VN