Autonomy and Mental Health Care: Enabling The Pursuit of A Life Of Meaning

One of the central aims of mental healthcare should be to increase a person's autonomous agency. In a mental healthcare context, it is often argued that mental healthcare should maximize a person's autonomy so they can make autonomous choices about their treatment. My argument in this paper is broader: mental healthcare should increase autonomous agency so that a person can exercise direction over their life and live a life of meaning. Mental healthcare can and ought to increase autonomous agency by helping the person achieve both internal and external conditions of autonomy. Mental healthcare can fulfill these conditions by reducing mental illness symptoms and thus enhancing competence and voluntariness, increasing the capacity for reflective endorsement by examining the influence of social norms, enabling normative authority through the development of self-worth, and connecting individuals with services that can provide multiple good options to choose from.