It's "Mental Illness Doesn't Do That" Season Once Again

wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

Kanye West has posted a long apology for his past anti-Semitic and otherwise offensive comments and behavior. Social media, of course, is lighting up with people denying him any forgiveness or understanding, because that’s what social media does, make people vengeful and closeminded and righteous and ugly. And naturally, they’re deploying their favorite trope, “mental illness doesn’t do that.” They assert, with magisterial certainty and zero expertise, that mental illness could not cause the bad behaviors that Kanye West is guilty of, and therefore no one is obligated to give him any grace - any reasonable accommodation - for his mental illness. QED, Kanye, QED.

I was in a support group years ago with a guy who had a strange, sunken-in look to his face, like his cheeks were collapsing in on themselves. One day he shared with the group. It turned out that he was a schizophrenic and a good 15 or 20 years younger than I had assumed; psychotic living is hard living and it ages you terribly. His odd face, though, was the product of a specific behavior. At some point, galactically psychotic, he had ripped out a bunch of his teeth with pliers, in what must have been a truly hideous effort. I’m guessing he had become convinced that the CIA had bugged them or that they were transmitting data to planet Nebulon or whatever else his diseased, paranoid brain had come up with. And because he was a schizophrenic acting the way a schizophrenic acts, he didn’t get any help for days. By the time he was brought to the emergency room, he was suffering some sort of hideous infection in his mouth, and the doctors had to remove a lot of tissue - debriding is the term of art - and that’s why he looked that way. That’s how he had disfigured himself. But mental illness doesn’t do that.

Postpartum psychosis causes mothers to drown their infants, but mental illness doesn’t do that. Coprophagics sit in group therapy, casually reach down and defecate in their hands and start smearing it on their body without seeming to notice, but mental illness doesn’t do that. Schizoaffectives wander onto subway tracks, bystanders screaming to them to stop, then get cut in half, but mental illness doesn’t do that. Women with obsessive compulsive disorder scour the interiors of their vaginas with steel wool in a brutal effort to cleanse themselves of contaminants that aren’t there, then die from the infections, but mental illness doesn’t do that. Catatonic patients literally die from a lack of movement, from deep vein thrombosis, from pulmonary embolism, from pneumonia, from malnutrition, but mental illness doesn’t do that. Men with schizophrenia attempt to circumcise themselves with random pieces of jagged metal, but mental illness doesn’t do that. And people with bipolar disorder slowly and painstakingly build their lives like everybody else, and then in a few short manic weeks, set everything they’ve built on fire. But mental illness doesn’t do that.

I’ve written this piece so many times, it’s exhausting for me. I can’t imagine how exhausting it is for my readers. But nothing ever changes. And if there’s one thing I hate in this world, it’s moral convenience - moral judgements people develop because it makes life easier for them, practically or emotionally or socially, rather than because they’re actually correct. Some are asking “Are people saying that we all have to forgive Kanye for everything???” No. No one is saying that you must forgive him for everything or for anything. Nor can anyone say where his conscious behavior ended and his illness began. No one can offer you a simple acrostic for understanding his culpability for his behavior while he’s manic, and indeed no such guides exist for any person or any disorder. We are asking, perhaps, that you bear his illness in mind, that you not be blind to it, that you be willing to weigh it on your own scales of justice. We are asking you to be willing to be uncertain. You see, all of this is incredibly hard, for the ill and for the loved ones and for the bystanders who have to sort out where their responsibilities begin and end. But I can assure you that the glib, self-impressed, preening declaration “mental illness doesn’t do that” has no proximity, morally or medically, to the truth. “Mental illness doesn’t do that”? In this world, with these many people with hideously disordered brains? That’s the little quip you’re going with? Who the fuck do you people think you are?

I know it’s trite and cliched to say that social justice politics are like a religion, but in this I find many advocate of social justice quite like many Christians: they are members of a sect whose holy texts demand constant mercy but they hand out none. In these situations, their religion fails them, or really, they fail it. When I really feel like hating the world, when I really want to climb into despair, I think of how many of the people out there saying “mental illness doesn’t do that” have diagnosed themselves with trite, false, trendy versions of real disorders that really afflict the people who actually have them, people who drape their online presence with their totally unique and adorable autism or ADHD diagnoses and, from that position, demand the world accommodate them. The world must bend to their neurodivergence! They demand accommodation! I am entitled to more time to take the test! Anytime these little psychosocial baubles are not promptly distributed to them, they cry out against the bigotry the disabled face. But Kanye West, a man who could not possibly look, sound, appear, and act more like a bipolar guy if he tried? They will extend him nothing. And this is why the gentrification of disability is such a cruel, ugly development, because it trains people to think that actual disorder, real deviance, authentic disease, is something else than their vision of noble illness, not worthy of the few meager crumbs of accommodation our society has parceled out for the most afflicted. Go post your preening self-diagnosed personality-surrogate #actuallydisabled content. Enjoy.

If you don’t want to forgive Kanye, don’t. No one is forcing you to. I imagine you’ll be in good company. But there are consequences, for what you believe and what you don’t, for who you’ll find a little scrap of grace for and who you won’t. At some point, attention must be paid to how awfully convenient moral convenience can be. You can say “mental illness doesn’t do that” every time someone prominent with a mental illness misbehaves, serene in the absence of moral complexity. Or you can talk about “ableism” and claim to be a friend to those with mental illness. But you can’t do both. You can’t do both. I won’t let you.