Psychoeugenics

A speculative concept referring to the application of eugenic principles to psychology and mental health—the idea of selecting, engineering, or eliminating psychological traits deemed undesirable. Psychoeugenics encompasses historical practices (forced sterilization of people diagnosed with mental illness) and hypothetical futures (genetic selection for "emotional stability," neural engineering for "normal" personality, elimination of neurodivergence). The term connects contemporary mental health discourse to the dark history of eugenics, asking whether the drive to eliminate mental illness can be separated from the drive to eliminate mentally ill people. Critics argue that psychoeugenics repeats eugenic logic by treating psychological variation as defect, framing elimination as treatment, and assuming there is one "healthy" way to be human.

Example: "The campaign to eliminate 'depression genes' through embryo selection was called psychoeugenics—not because it was about curing illness, but because it assumed some people shouldn't exist."

by Abzugal March 22, 2026