Here's Your Kanye West Cliff Notes
I have no inside knowledge of Kanye West’s mental health or psychiatric state, and any suggestions I make here to that effect are matters of speculation. I’m not diagnosing him, suggesting a course of treatment for him, or intending to define his own mental health condition for him. His health is only available to me to the degree that he’s talked about it and demonstrated it through the media. I’m not making any claims about what’s really going on in his head.
Kanye West now says he’s not bipolar, but rather autistic; true to form, he has done this in the most bipolar-guy way I can imagine. (Shopping for an autism diagnosis and then attempting to pour one’s entire personality and problems into that diagnosis - stars, they’re just like us!)
He’s grown increasingly unstable, particularly on social media, prompting more and more criticism and performative exhaustion from the type of people who most directly shape American culture and media. They are, in particular, less and less likely to extend any accommodation to him based on the durable moral logic that someone operating at diminished capacity is someone whose culpability should at least be put into that context, should at least be understood to be complicated. They don’t want to hear about his mental illness as a potential influence on his ugly behavior.
This underlines how strange elite attitudes towards mental health and disability have become: the more or less explicit attitude of West’s many critics has been that, as he has become more and more unstable, they have grown less likely to allow for the possibility that his actions are influenced by mental illness and thus not entirely his fault. That’s weird!
That dynamic is the product of broad and unhealthy dynamics in our modern understanding of disability, dynamics which are the product of identity liberalism and disability activists. In particular, the progressive definition of disabilities has evolved from unfortunate hindrances that society must help to ameliorate with reasonable accommodation - a definition that was not broken, by the way - to all-defining, all-encompassing identity categories. And, as identity categories, disabilities cannot be perceived in a negative light; they must be seen as equally-valid ways of existing that are just different, not worse, for fear of contributing to “stigma.”
But why would treating disabilities as perfectly valid identity markers lead to less sympathy for West? Because it prompts a dilemma: these people really hate Kanye, but they’ve been trained by their political tribe to see those with disabilities as perfect unblemished angels, beings of pure light, in common with progressive attitudes towards “marginalized peoples.” The only way to resolve these feelings is to deny that West’s behavior could possibly be the result of his disability. If identity liberalism insists that people with disabilities are to be treated as blameless, and you’re an identity liberal who very much wants to blame Kanye West, you must deny that he has a disability or that his disability could possibly be related to his behavior.
This is what has led to the sublimely witless claim “Mental illness doesn’t do that!” It’s become a commonplace on social media. 20 year olds with absolutely no background in psychiatry confidently stare into their front-facing cameras and declare what mental illness can and can’t do. Mental illness can prompt people to cut out their own tongues, to light themselves on fire, to kill their children because they believe that CIA bugs are implanted in their brains, but it can’t prompt ordinary socially disreputable behavior or bigotry, apparently. It’s hard to believe, but very convenient for people who are desperately trying to keep various elements of their personality and politics stitched together without confronting the contradictions.
If you’ve been in a facility with very mentally unwell people for a significant amount of time, you’re likely to find the notion that people with mental illness would never engage in bigoted language totally bonkers, as that kind of thing is ubiquitous in those spaces. Do you have the slightest idea how many paranoid schizophrenics mutter about the Jews? Do you have the slightest idea how often you hear the n-word on a locked ward? This stuff is absolutely rampant, and the idea that it doesn’t exist is, again, a ploy by people who want to maintain their attachment to the idea that people from marginalized identities don’t do anything wrong. People suffering from paranoia and delusions borrow their fears and theories from the ambient culture, and there’s a lot of bigotry in the ambient culture. Ugly but true.
Do you have to entirely forgive Kanye West for his bigoted statements? Do you have to entirely forgive those people muttering slurs on a psych ward? Do you have to break bread with those people, be their friends, support their careers? No, you don’t. Instead, you should use your brain. Your understanding of their mental illness should mitigate your judgment. It should complicate your moral instincts. It should inform your decisions about how you want to treat someone. I’m annoyed by how pat this cliche is, but it’s mostly true: our psychiatric illnesses are never our fault but always our responsibility. And adults can make adult decisions about whether or not to associate with someone (or play their music or whatever) while taking their mental illnesses into account. But it’s hard. Treatment resistance is real. Serious mental illness can make it very difficult for people to occupy the mindset necessary to choose to embrace meds and therapy. Severe psychiatric disorders can be so hard on families and friends because they make this kind of calculus feel impossible, like you can’t forgive someone but can’t let go of them either.
The point is that there is no simplistic rubric you can apply for how to feel about mentally ill people, their disorders, or their behavior, including Kanye West, no matter what TikTok says. “Mental illness doesn’t do that” is embraced so lustily precisely because it appears to remove the burden of responsibility of judgment, takes away these sticky, unhappy, shaky decisions we make about how to treat people with mental illness. And in that it’s part and parcel of a broader world of identity liberalism which has relentlessly pursued an ethics of moral simplicity and universal ethical binarism, dividing the world into the utterly pure and good and blameless on one side and the forever unclean on the other. Madness is particularly poorly suited to this sort of thing, which is why so many liberals are so aggressive in insisting that “mental illness doesn’t do that.” They don’t want to experience the unmoored feeling of being unsure of how to judge someone.
Aside from deeper moral considerations, Kanye West is also very annoying to many people, and this too makes them uncomfortable. They’re too invested in the notion of mental illness as a kind of beautiful madness, as a cool and free-spirited way to live free from society’s conformity. In fact mentally ill people are very, very often deeply annoying. Trust me. Pathetic is another word that I’d use, to describe many people with psychiatric disorders. No romance to be found. A psychotic person is only sometimes dangerous, but they’re always annoying. Adjust your perceptions accordingly.
The only way we get out of this mess is by rejecting the idea that being mentally ill or having a disability generally is a form of identity category like being Black or a woman or gay; that idea has proven to be ruinous. We have to stop acting like diagnoses are items on an ala carte menu, to pick and choose for the purpose of farming attention and sympathy and to define the self. We have to do whatever we can to reject the notion that disabilities are lovable little quirks that define the self, rather than unfortunate hindrances that we should get rid of if we can or, if we can’t, ameliorate with appropriate policy. And we have to stop demanding that the world fit into our rigid binary beliefs in good and bad, in blameless victims and awful oppressors. The world’s more complicated than that, particularly regarding the broken mind.
Again, I have no inside knowledge when it comes to West, can’t diagnose him or read his mind, and have very limited ability to understand him. But people who talk like he talks and acts like he acts and go unmedicated for as long as he have tend to end up killing themselves.