"West acts in bizarre and unstable ways, his speech is frequently confused and difficult to follow, his thought patterns appear disordered and his actions dysregulated. He could hardly better epitomize the tragedy of the rich, famous, and unwell; he’s surrounded by yes-men and enablers that prevent him from having to serious grapple with how obviously, intensely unhealthy he’s become. Rabin has no time to think about that, or more likely, no moral mental space in which to consider it."
We all know that mental illness sometimes does do that. Yes, even that.
But nobody gets cool points for pointing that a Kanye is unwell, for calmer voices to prevail, Far better for one's visilbility and status to bust out the pitchfork and shout "Burn The Witch!"
As a materialist, the way we distinguish between "mental illness" and "culpability" makes absolutely no sense to me. Because as far as we can tell, all behavior is a result of brain chemistry and structure, whether that brain is somehow disordered, or completely normal. Sure, there are outside stimuli that affect the brain - and thus behavior - but there's not some magic free will machine within the brain which allows free decisions in some areas (and for some people) and a lack of responsibility in others.
I mean, from a public policy perspective, I do get it. Norms matter for people who aren't disordered, influencing them on a subconscious level, even if they aren't directly aware. As a result, I think it's generally good to have pro-social norms, even if I don't think that individuals have the free will to pick the "right" choice. It's castigating the behavior of the truly disordered I just don't get. The ramifications of said behavior have to be - must be - dealt with. But that's where it should end.
Recently I watched the movie "Split" with a couple of friends and they were all apoplectic over how the film depicted mental illness - it's "harmful," the kind of movie that "gets mentally ill people killed" and should have a disclaimer before it, possibly even (and I swear one person said this) it should be "illegal to make movies like this." Authoritarian censoriousnrss aside, the stated reason was that "study after study" proves that mental illness doesn't make people violent and all I could think was – how the fuck can you prove that? What definition of mental illness are these studies using that excludes Son of Sam believing a talking dog told him to kill people? How can you accept that the entirety of someone's inner world can be totally deranged but also believe that, somehow, it can never be responsible for them commiting violence?
It's a worldview I find impossible to argue with because the rupture in assumptions is so huge. One of the friends in question has spent years dealing with a severely mentally ill family member, so I trust that he knows much more about treatments and studies than I do, but still. The stated conclusions seem so insane I don't know how to relate to people claiming them. Mostly it makes me believe that mental health care as a field must also be deranged.
In a very narrow sense, I do find that claim defensible. Sort of like how if someone only engages in homosexual behavior when drunk, the alcohol doesn't "make them gay." Instead, it lowers inhibitions toward same sex behavior that are always there.
Similarly, I can buy that some people are just angrier/more prone to violence than others, but social norms generally keep them in check. As mental illness causes them to become disordered, they act out violently, where others with the same diagnosis may only be harmful to themselves.
That said, I'm guessing their opposition more sprang from the idea that any negative stereotype in a movie might hurt someone, somewhere.
For the friend with the mentally ill family member, I suspect that the movie was perceived as an attack and all of the "studies show" rhetoric was an attempt to symbolically protect said relative.
I don't know what was motivating the other guys to pile on though.
>Similarly, I can buy that some people are just angrier/more prone to violence than others, but social norms generally keep them in check. As mental illness causes them to become disordered, they act out violently, where others with the same diagnosis may only be harmful to themselves.
And the events in Split are 100% compatible with that view – the movie even shows that most of the personalities inside Kevin (the main antagonist) are not violent or harmful in any way. I'm not exaggerating when I say my friends group was arguing that it's dangerous to view mental illness as even being *connected* woth violence. They went so far as to say that the mentally ill are only harmful to themselves.
I have to type all this out because I still can't process how crazy the whole conversation made me feel just from listening to it.
"their opposition more sprang from the idea that any negative stereotype in a movie might hurt someone, somewhere". Yes, but even more from the idea that people are either entirely good or entirely bad, and people who are victimized or marginalized can only belong to group #1. It's mind boggling.
1) People of a loose set of groups (typically progressive and online) have a set of attributes they view as something approaching evil -- or at least very immoral. For example, racist, misogynistic, marginalized-identity-phobic.
2) They want to use those attributes to tag their political and cultural enemies. That's basically what the attributes are for. So a Republican being racist? Yes, that's what the label is for.
3) They find these labels so toxic that they do not want any identity they consider sacred (which includes all marginalized identities as they define the margins) to get associated with them. The mentally ill are marginalized, so tagging them with attributes like racist is cruel and can't really be true because these labels are for our enemies, for the bad people, the immoral people. So we can't associate "racist" with the identity of mentally ill. It *has* to be the (mentally ill) person's fault. For the same reason, they define "racism" as prejudice + power, because if it was merely prejudice based on race, many marginalized identities would likely get tagged as racist.
As an analogy, I'm thinking about "progressives" confusion when hearing misogynistic rap lyrics. There are plenty of similar cases. That's when things get interesting.
You can get a pretty close approximation of it if you replace "freely chosen behaviors" with "ability to change behavior in response to incentives, praise, condemnation, norms, etc" and also "ability to influence behavior with willpower." Where the people Freddy is complaining about seem to be going wrong is they have no tolerance for ambiguity, so they don't understand when a mental illness makes someone less responsive to norms, incentives, etc than normal, but not 100% unresponsive.
"there are outside stimuli that affect the brain - and thus behavior - but there's not some magic free will machine within the brain which allows free decisions in some areas (and for some people) and a lack of responsibility in others."
You're parsing the situation as if there's either free will for all in every situation, or there isn't any free will for anyone, ever, in any meaningful sense (which is evidently your position.)
That's a false casting of the situation. For one thing, there isn't just one "brain." (You begin by positing that, and then go on to acknowledge that differences exist, although you seem to think they only exist as a distinction between "people who aren't disordered" and "the truly disordered." Which is still waay too reductive.)
Free will is not to be reduced to the mechanistic caricature of "some magic free will machine", either. The latitude of free will in any given individual is always delimited in all sorts of ways and those constraints eventually manifest at the idiosyncratic level. I think free will is an actual thing, but I'm also aware that free will doesn't call the shots in every respect of my life. Free will actually doesn't come into play all that often--but however large the percentage of my behavior that can be calculated as determined and predictable, the remaining latitude for me to exercise free will is crucial. That last swerve--that last act of choice--that no one else can govern or predict but myself is crucial, and all the post hoc propter hoc facile philosophizing and just-so gainsaying that insists otherwise is irrelevant. Which is to say that my position is that sometimes there's a latent potential for the role of free will to activate, and other times not. (Most of the time not, probably. But that isn't the same as none of the time.)
That said, one of the salient features of individuals with serious mental illness is increased sensitivity and vulnerability to input. (Not that there's an objective standard of "normality"; such judgements are relative aggregated estimates,) That porousness to the influences of the stimuli of the outer world is a vulnerability, and it diminishes the sober exercise of free will. (That capability which, agreed, is commonly delimited to begin with.) A society with toxic aspects (and few if any are entirely benevolent) harbors more unhealthy stimuli, and (to resort to a reductive metaphor) vulnerable people are like sponges for that energy. Particularly those oversensitized to their social environment, like people on the bipolar, schizoaffective, schizophrenic spectrum.
I actually just made a comment about this before reading down to see this.
“Any materialist, especially a Marxist, should be the first to recount that conditions of material reality are contextual. The behavior of anyone with mental illness is contingent upon, and contextually determined in part by, their physical conditions - that being, some sort of mental illness that is influencing their psychological state(s). The subjective experience of mental illness supervenes on the reality that there is in-fact an experience of some diagnosable mental illness.”
Materialism doesn’t necessarily negate agency or free will. As such, social norms can’t demand a lack of ability to transgress them. But that won’t stop tribalist behavior from outcasting said transgressions, regardless of if they stem from a point of principle or from mental illness. It also doesn’t make anyone any less culpable for their behavior, as any action taken is still extant.
"I could hardly better encapsulate my great frustration with modern mental health culture - which will all be expressed in a new book from Simon & Schuster coming in 2026". I am very excited for this - I personally think it's the most important thing you could be working on since it's where your writing is at its strongest and your perspective more valuable.
The ND movement is destructive at worst, unhelpful at best. I think they really effed up when they made Asperger’s syndrome Autism I. Asperger’s IS a disability that can hold many an intelligent person back, especially when your career requires conforming to social norms and customs. That being said, it is nothing like being severely autistic, and lumping it under the umbrella of autism just gives high functioning autistics a reason to say their stupid “yes I’m like your child,” bullshit. Do you have a head injury similar to those found in professional boxers, Lydia? No? Then be quiet.
"lumping it under the umbrella of autism just gives high functioning autistics a reason to say their stupid 'yes I’m like your child,' bullshit"
Um, no. If a high-functioning autistic person says "I'm like your child," that just means that they don't understand how big a difference there is between Type 1 and Type 3 autism. As for why seemingly disparate conditions are put on the same spectrum, it's because there are still some underlying similarities, and that often becomes clearer when one sees how autism runs in families. I myself am high-functioning autistic, while my brother, also autistic, is far lower functioning -- and both of us were diagnosed well before the neurodiversity movement got traction.
The reason they got rid of Asperger's as a separate diagnosis is that it was essentially a second label for high-functioning autism, with no clear difference between the two conditions. It was just a mess, and people knew it was a mess, and it got cleaned up in DSM-V.
Either that or they are noting a sense of empathy and intuitive understanding of the child’s behaviour in a way most NTs lack. Not accusing OP but there are an awful lot of clueless parents and family members who genuinely have no idea how to handle their children and what is attempting to be communicated when they behave how they do. Being autistic doesn’t automatically make you qualified to understand every other autistic person, but people would probably be surprised how fine the line is for some from ‘low functioning’ and ‘high functioning but in meltdown’.
Maybe when the behavior is being observed in person (and not necessarily even then). When it's asserted that some rando on Reddit understands my child's behavior better than the person who's cared for her for 20 years, based solely on a forum post, I agree with Maura. It's just bullshit.
Cool, your point is well taken. Personally I think lumping Aspergers in with more severe types of autism does a disservice to all people on the spectrum because the needs are so different. When you have average to above average intelligence, it’s a vastly different type of disability Maybe it only needs to be a social delineation, but as a high functioning autistic who works with the profoundly autistic, I’m tired of high functioning people driving conversations about care and services they know nothing about.
"as a high functioning autistic who works with the profoundly autistic, I’m tired of high functioning people driving conversations about care and services they know nothing about."
Now that I understand, readily. (Probably my mom understands that even more at a gut level, since she's the one who's cleaned 💩 off the walls of my brother's bedroom 😬.)
Yeah, and honestly I’ve been thinking a lot (perseverating 😅) on what you said about it all just being autism, and it makes a lot of sense. I didn’t think of it in familial terms because thus far, I’m the only one diagnosed in my family. I thank you for your perspective 🙂.
What ‘ND movement’ are you referring to here? Nothing Freddie writes about here bears any resemblance to real life Autistic groups (as opposed to the fictional ones NTs like to straw man to give them another excuse to be ableist).
Oh, honestly, I think I know the ND movement to which she refers. There's definitely a movement that tries to portray autism and such as just a "difference" not a disability. I've even seen pictures from a children's book from someone in the ND movement, where they try to reassure that an ND kid's brain is "perfect" for them. (As if anyone's brain is "perfect"! Loki knows that NT brains certainly aren't. 🙄) This ND movement also often gets precious about language in a way that suspiciously makes it harder to plainly talk about those whose conditions can't be honestly described as mere difference.
Is that an actual ND movement though, or is that just Autism Speaks style parents? There’s the specific example of the ‘high functioning/low functioning debate’, but even that feels like a slightly fringe movement. In terms of the difference vs disability thing, there is a definite case of autistic people feeling (rightly) that their condition is not a thing to be cured but a part of who they are, and so take offence at the way NTs will act like they are somehow subhuman and need to be corrected for it (Freddie skirts dangerously close to this in several of his blogs). However, beyond that point, I’ve yet to meet an autistic person who gives the slightest f*** about any of that difference vs disability language nonsense - that side of things is entirely condescending NTs (I swear though, if I get called a ‘Person with Autism’ one more time…)
"Is that an actual ND movement though, or is that just Autism Speaks style parents?"
From personal experience, it's definitely from the ND movement. Autism Speaks has many faults (like having fallen for nonsense about autism and vaccines), but sugarcoating disability is not one of them.
if you’re in highly social justice oriented spaces, especially nerd hobbies (online, fandom conventions, tabletop games, etc.) there’s a ton of it. at its best, still a helpful movement, but very stupid at its worst.
I leaned to appreciate this when I worked as a psych tech on a locked adult hospital unit while going to college. People in the throes of mania are complete assholes. BUT I would watch them slowly get better over the course of a few weeks until they became COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PEOPLE then they were when admitted. I learned a lot about humanity during that time of my life. Including mental illness MUST be considered when morally judging another human being.
Not surprisingly, your writing about mental illness is always spot on. If you've ever really been around someone deep in a manic episode, there's no mistaking it. People ruin their lives in a matter of months...financially, professionally, socially. They typically don't even really remember what happened, almost like a bad night of blackout drinking.
It's a lot like a severe form of intoxication, in my observation. The saying about people in the middle of an alcohol binge is that "they aren't themselves." They aren't the same person that the witness knows under the circumstance of sobriety. The sense of communication, common bonding, is lost. It's like the wires are down.
Also, this is an aside, but given you mentioned the whole Manic Pixie Dream Girl thing, I had a discussion about it recently with a friend. I pointed out the relentless mocking of the trope into non-existence was arguably very, very bad for cultural discourse around young men in general.
Fundamentally, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl was a character in a male-focused romance story. A sad, introverted boy has a dull gray life, and meets this wild, quirky woman who gets him out of his shell and helps him learn how to love life. This is in a lot of ways just a gender-flipped version of the standard female romance novel, without all the icky non-consensual elements. They often weren't even overtly sexualized, as it was more about romantic attraction than sexual attraction.
Were they deep? Absolutely not! But was Edward Cullen from Twilight deep? The point of the romantic leads isn't to be fully-fleshed characters, it's to be seen from the POV of the protagonist. And it probably spoke to something in a certain kind of stale, sad, wonder-bread boy. Not to mention absolutely nothing in the world of (straight) male romance has replaced it.
Yeah, it's "what if a cool person wanted to be your friend," or "what if someone interesting entered our boring-ass life." It's a fantasy that, no matter how dull or generic you are, someone will like you for YOU. And the fantasy that the world of ADVENTURE that you dreamed about as a kid and saw in movies and TV but which never quite appeared.
"Were I Nathan Rabin, I would ask myself this question: why am I so eager to hand blanket exoneration for all misdeeds to the vast, vague, and medically meaningless group known as The Neurodivergent, when a clearly deeply-ill celebrity who’s said genuinely ugly things receives no such consideration?"
You answered that yourself, Freddie! By denying his diagnosis, Kanye West is eschewing any avenue for accountability.
My Inner Libertarian—with whom I struggle on a daily basis 😀: Is _that_ a DSM-5-TR diagnosis yet?—sez you should always take people at their word when they're talking about their own mental status. If Kanye West tells me he is _not_ mentally ill, far be it from me to bestow protected status upon him.
By the way, if you're interested in cinematic depictions of the mentally ill, I strongly recommend "Revolutionary Road."
Maybe rather than being mentally ill, Kanye is just wrong and needs to grow up, mature. Maybe he had bad parenting. Perhaps he needs to be saved, e.g. have a Power greater than himself forgive his sins and provide the help and guidance he needs. Maybe all people are in that same position, we are not who we ought to be and ultimately only God can help.
I offer this simply as a starting point to provoke further thought, not a definitive statement.
He’s also been in a position where most everyone says yes to anything he says than the opposite and has no day to day need to show up for work. That extends your period of untrammeled brainplay a great deal. My dad’s clear break happened because regular structures exacerbated the mental problems. It made the just-under-the-surface break through. Interestingly, his break happened when he was refused an opportunity that would have given him actual power and sway over others. Had he gotten that opportunity, his actions could have had more time in the wild and hurt far more people than his family.
Being more sympathetic to the mentally ill should mean acknowledging that it's more self-destructive, since that correlates with something to be sympathetic for. Taken as a limit, you could say that the limit of your sympathy towards the unwell approaches its absolute maximum as its self-destructiveness approaches infinity.
Also, the first exchange might be received better by progressives if you remade it in cartoon form. Sad but true.
Severe mental illness can cause paranoia, it can cause people to see and hear things that aren’t there, and in rare cases cause people to act violently toward themselves or others, all well documented. But cause people to dabble in conspiracy theories and racist stereotypes that they’d likely otherwise avoid? Absolutely impossible. Unfathomable! We literally have an insanity defense codified in our legal system because we acknowledge that people in the midst of a psychotic episode can commit crimes they otherwise wouldn’t have. But mental illness could never make someone susceptible to racist ideas? What an odd line to draw.
— mental illness does not plant racist/sexist/bigoted things into someone’s brain de novo
— mental illness may remove inhibition, but removing inhibition simply reveals the “true person” underneath
— it is therefore *even easier* to straightforwardly judge a drunk or someone with a disorder like Bipolar because they are showing us “who they really are.”
(Judging someone for this is really not coherent in a worldview which simultaneously asserts that *everyone* is secretly racist; it is *impossible* not to be secretly racist, but let’s leave that to the side.)
There are a lot of mistaken assumptions here but I am most interested in the assumption that “inhibition” is primarily (maybe only) a bad thing, and that removing it is how we see the “true self,” which can best (maybe only) be understood apart from the layers of social conditioning we put on top of it.
I tend to think that for most people the “self” resides in the interplay between core impulse and inhibition. It doesn’t tell me too much about a person to know that they sometimes have the urge to shout racial slurs out the train window (or whatever). The way that person chooses to handle the temptation tells me much, much more about them.
I always felt weird about the makers of Ambien saying "Racism is not a side-effect of Ambien." I think it's tough to fight back against it because you have to stand up for racism and/or Roseanne Barr (who *did* compare a black woman to a monkey).
According to drugs dot com, the "Common" (1% to 10%) side effects include confusion, disinhibition, disorientation, hallucinations, inappropriate behavior, major depression, mood swings.
So I mean... maybe? I don't know. If something is a horrible enough sin then we have to go after people who do it even when disinhibited or hallucinating, I guess? No such thing as too vigilant against that sin.
I think there's a fear that if you can "get away" with racism via cognitive disorder, then other people will just do racism and then claim cognitive disorder. So, hey, we can't accept that. If you give people a shield against being accused of something, some *will* use it. (Ignore the other shields that exist for things beneficial to my tribe.)
I've never understood people who make blanket claims that mental illness doesn't cause violent behavior. Of course it can. If, in your addled mind, you believed someone was coming at you with a knife wouldn't you react with force to stop it? That is actually just rational behavior based on irrational bat shit crazy thoughts.
My perspective is that there is no real hard line denoting mental illness vs irrational thoughts and behaviors. Someone needing cognitive behavior therapy might not be diagnosed with clinical mental illness, but might be even more disordered and hazardous to themselves and others. Clearly there are more definitive symtoms that support definitive diagnosis, but it is a mixed bag. For example, my father hears voices and wears headphones and listens to the radio to block them. However he is otherwise capable to take care of himself at 87. Contrast that to a friend of mine who struggled keeping a job because of extreme vulnerable narcissism that years of cognitive behavior therapy finally seemed to help correct for.
I see just about everything on a linear spectrum of human mental and physical capability that is an inventory of innate sub capabilities... many if not most that can be improved. In my mind, acceptance of those differences along with an opinion that all can progress, is the true moral essence of human diversity acceptance.
I wonder how the adherents of the current progressive orthodoxy on mental health commute. I was 19 when I had my first experience of being monomaniacally harangued about the evils of Asian immigration to Australia for the duration of a passenger train journey in Melbourne, and 21 when I was assaulted at random while attempting to alight from a tram. Both the haranguer and the assailant were clearly mentally unwell. Anyone who uses public transport to any extent will sooner or later encounter some such person whose personal predicament warrants our sympathy but whose behaviour may be anything from offensive to dangerous to people around them.
"West acts in bizarre and unstable ways, his speech is frequently confused and difficult to follow, his thought patterns appear disordered and his actions dysregulated. He could hardly better epitomize the tragedy of the rich, famous, and unwell; he’s surrounded by yes-men and enablers that prevent him from having to serious grapple with how obviously, intensely unhealthy he’s become. Rabin has no time to think about that, or more likely, no moral mental space in which to consider it."
We all know that mental illness sometimes does do that. Yes, even that.
But nobody gets cool points for pointing that a Kanye is unwell, for calmer voices to prevail, Far better for one's visilbility and status to bust out the pitchfork and shout "Burn The Witch!"
As a materialist, the way we distinguish between "mental illness" and "culpability" makes absolutely no sense to me. Because as far as we can tell, all behavior is a result of brain chemistry and structure, whether that brain is somehow disordered, or completely normal. Sure, there are outside stimuli that affect the brain - and thus behavior - but there's not some magic free will machine within the brain which allows free decisions in some areas (and for some people) and a lack of responsibility in others.
I mean, from a public policy perspective, I do get it. Norms matter for people who aren't disordered, influencing them on a subconscious level, even if they aren't directly aware. As a result, I think it's generally good to have pro-social norms, even if I don't think that individuals have the free will to pick the "right" choice. It's castigating the behavior of the truly disordered I just don't get. The ramifications of said behavior have to be - must be - dealt with. But that's where it should end.
Recently I watched the movie "Split" with a couple of friends and they were all apoplectic over how the film depicted mental illness - it's "harmful," the kind of movie that "gets mentally ill people killed" and should have a disclaimer before it, possibly even (and I swear one person said this) it should be "illegal to make movies like this." Authoritarian censoriousnrss aside, the stated reason was that "study after study" proves that mental illness doesn't make people violent and all I could think was – how the fuck can you prove that? What definition of mental illness are these studies using that excludes Son of Sam believing a talking dog told him to kill people? How can you accept that the entirety of someone's inner world can be totally deranged but also believe that, somehow, it can never be responsible for them commiting violence?
It's a worldview I find impossible to argue with because the rupture in assumptions is so huge. One of the friends in question has spent years dealing with a severely mentally ill family member, so I trust that he knows much more about treatments and studies than I do, but still. The stated conclusions seem so insane I don't know how to relate to people claiming them. Mostly it makes me believe that mental health care as a field must also be deranged.
In a very narrow sense, I do find that claim defensible. Sort of like how if someone only engages in homosexual behavior when drunk, the alcohol doesn't "make them gay." Instead, it lowers inhibitions toward same sex behavior that are always there.
Similarly, I can buy that some people are just angrier/more prone to violence than others, but social norms generally keep them in check. As mental illness causes them to become disordered, they act out violently, where others with the same diagnosis may only be harmful to themselves.
That said, I'm guessing their opposition more sprang from the idea that any negative stereotype in a movie might hurt someone, somewhere.
For the friend with the mentally ill family member, I suspect that the movie was perceived as an attack and all of the "studies show" rhetoric was an attempt to symbolically protect said relative.
I don't know what was motivating the other guys to pile on though.
>Similarly, I can buy that some people are just angrier/more prone to violence than others, but social norms generally keep them in check. As mental illness causes them to become disordered, they act out violently, where others with the same diagnosis may only be harmful to themselves.
And the events in Split are 100% compatible with that view – the movie even shows that most of the personalities inside Kevin (the main antagonist) are not violent or harmful in any way. I'm not exaggerating when I say my friends group was arguing that it's dangerous to view mental illness as even being *connected* woth violence. They went so far as to say that the mentally ill are only harmful to themselves.
I have to type all this out because I still can't process how crazy the whole conversation made me feel just from listening to it.
"their opposition more sprang from the idea that any negative stereotype in a movie might hurt someone, somewhere". Yes, but even more from the idea that people are either entirely good or entirely bad, and people who are victimized or marginalized can only belong to group #1. It's mind boggling.
My theory, for whatever that is worth....
1) People of a loose set of groups (typically progressive and online) have a set of attributes they view as something approaching evil -- or at least very immoral. For example, racist, misogynistic, marginalized-identity-phobic.
2) They want to use those attributes to tag their political and cultural enemies. That's basically what the attributes are for. So a Republican being racist? Yes, that's what the label is for.
3) They find these labels so toxic that they do not want any identity they consider sacred (which includes all marginalized identities as they define the margins) to get associated with them. The mentally ill are marginalized, so tagging them with attributes like racist is cruel and can't really be true because these labels are for our enemies, for the bad people, the immoral people. So we can't associate "racist" with the identity of mentally ill. It *has* to be the (mentally ill) person's fault. For the same reason, they define "racism" as prejudice + power, because if it was merely prejudice based on race, many marginalized identities would likely get tagged as racist.
As an analogy, I'm thinking about "progressives" confusion when hearing misogynistic rap lyrics. There are plenty of similar cases. That's when things get interesting.
Or Hamas's anti-Semitism.
There was a self-righteous hubbub on my campus when France outlawed the veil in public. "Where did your feminism go?" I wanted to ask them.
You can get a pretty close approximation of it if you replace "freely chosen behaviors" with "ability to change behavior in response to incentives, praise, condemnation, norms, etc" and also "ability to influence behavior with willpower." Where the people Freddy is complaining about seem to be going wrong is they have no tolerance for ambiguity, so they don't understand when a mental illness makes someone less responsive to norms, incentives, etc than normal, but not 100% unresponsive.
Couldn't agree more with this and was happy to see this point made.
"there are outside stimuli that affect the brain - and thus behavior - but there's not some magic free will machine within the brain which allows free decisions in some areas (and for some people) and a lack of responsibility in others."
You're parsing the situation as if there's either free will for all in every situation, or there isn't any free will for anyone, ever, in any meaningful sense (which is evidently your position.)
That's a false casting of the situation. For one thing, there isn't just one "brain." (You begin by positing that, and then go on to acknowledge that differences exist, although you seem to think they only exist as a distinction between "people who aren't disordered" and "the truly disordered." Which is still waay too reductive.)
Free will is not to be reduced to the mechanistic caricature of "some magic free will machine", either. The latitude of free will in any given individual is always delimited in all sorts of ways and those constraints eventually manifest at the idiosyncratic level. I think free will is an actual thing, but I'm also aware that free will doesn't call the shots in every respect of my life. Free will actually doesn't come into play all that often--but however large the percentage of my behavior that can be calculated as determined and predictable, the remaining latitude for me to exercise free will is crucial. That last swerve--that last act of choice--that no one else can govern or predict but myself is crucial, and all the post hoc propter hoc facile philosophizing and just-so gainsaying that insists otherwise is irrelevant. Which is to say that my position is that sometimes there's a latent potential for the role of free will to activate, and other times not. (Most of the time not, probably. But that isn't the same as none of the time.)
That said, one of the salient features of individuals with serious mental illness is increased sensitivity and vulnerability to input. (Not that there's an objective standard of "normality"; such judgements are relative aggregated estimates,) That porousness to the influences of the stimuli of the outer world is a vulnerability, and it diminishes the sober exercise of free will. (That capability which, agreed, is commonly delimited to begin with.) A society with toxic aspects (and few if any are entirely benevolent) harbors more unhealthy stimuli, and (to resort to a reductive metaphor) vulnerable people are like sponges for that energy. Particularly those oversensitized to their social environment, like people on the bipolar, schizoaffective, schizophrenic spectrum.
I actually just made a comment about this before reading down to see this.
“Any materialist, especially a Marxist, should be the first to recount that conditions of material reality are contextual. The behavior of anyone with mental illness is contingent upon, and contextually determined in part by, their physical conditions - that being, some sort of mental illness that is influencing their psychological state(s). The subjective experience of mental illness supervenes on the reality that there is in-fact an experience of some diagnosable mental illness.”
Materialism doesn’t necessarily negate agency or free will. As such, social norms can’t demand a lack of ability to transgress them. But that won’t stop tribalist behavior from outcasting said transgressions, regardless of if they stem from a point of principle or from mental illness. It also doesn’t make anyone any less culpable for their behavior, as any action taken is still extant.
"I could hardly better encapsulate my great frustration with modern mental health culture - which will all be expressed in a new book from Simon & Schuster coming in 2026". I am very excited for this - I personally think it's the most important thing you could be working on since it's where your writing is at its strongest and your perspective more valuable.
The ND movement is destructive at worst, unhelpful at best. I think they really effed up when they made Asperger’s syndrome Autism I. Asperger’s IS a disability that can hold many an intelligent person back, especially when your career requires conforming to social norms and customs. That being said, it is nothing like being severely autistic, and lumping it under the umbrella of autism just gives high functioning autistics a reason to say their stupid “yes I’m like your child,” bullshit. Do you have a head injury similar to those found in professional boxers, Lydia? No? Then be quiet.
"lumping it under the umbrella of autism just gives high functioning autistics a reason to say their stupid 'yes I’m like your child,' bullshit"
Um, no. If a high-functioning autistic person says "I'm like your child," that just means that they don't understand how big a difference there is between Type 1 and Type 3 autism. As for why seemingly disparate conditions are put on the same spectrum, it's because there are still some underlying similarities, and that often becomes clearer when one sees how autism runs in families. I myself am high-functioning autistic, while my brother, also autistic, is far lower functioning -- and both of us were diagnosed well before the neurodiversity movement got traction.
The reason they got rid of Asperger's as a separate diagnosis is that it was essentially a second label for high-functioning autism, with no clear difference between the two conditions. It was just a mess, and people knew it was a mess, and it got cleaned up in DSM-V.
Either that or they are noting a sense of empathy and intuitive understanding of the child’s behaviour in a way most NTs lack. Not accusing OP but there are an awful lot of clueless parents and family members who genuinely have no idea how to handle their children and what is attempting to be communicated when they behave how they do. Being autistic doesn’t automatically make you qualified to understand every other autistic person, but people would probably be surprised how fine the line is for some from ‘low functioning’ and ‘high functioning but in meltdown’.
Maybe when the behavior is being observed in person (and not necessarily even then). When it's asserted that some rando on Reddit understands my child's behavior better than the person who's cared for her for 20 years, based solely on a forum post, I agree with Maura. It's just bullshit.
Cool, your point is well taken. Personally I think lumping Aspergers in with more severe types of autism does a disservice to all people on the spectrum because the needs are so different. When you have average to above average intelligence, it’s a vastly different type of disability Maybe it only needs to be a social delineation, but as a high functioning autistic who works with the profoundly autistic, I’m tired of high functioning people driving conversations about care and services they know nothing about.
"as a high functioning autistic who works with the profoundly autistic, I’m tired of high functioning people driving conversations about care and services they know nothing about."
Now that I understand, readily. (Probably my mom understands that even more at a gut level, since she's the one who's cleaned 💩 off the walls of my brother's bedroom 😬.)
Yeah, and honestly I’ve been thinking a lot (perseverating 😅) on what you said about it all just being autism, and it makes a lot of sense. I didn’t think of it in familial terms because thus far, I’m the only one diagnosed in my family. I thank you for your perspective 🙂.
What ‘ND movement’ are you referring to here? Nothing Freddie writes about here bears any resemblance to real life Autistic groups (as opposed to the fictional ones NTs like to straw man to give them another excuse to be ableist).
Oh, honestly, I think I know the ND movement to which she refers. There's definitely a movement that tries to portray autism and such as just a "difference" not a disability. I've even seen pictures from a children's book from someone in the ND movement, where they try to reassure that an ND kid's brain is "perfect" for them. (As if anyone's brain is "perfect"! Loki knows that NT brains certainly aren't. 🙄) This ND movement also often gets precious about language in a way that suspiciously makes it harder to plainly talk about those whose conditions can't be honestly described as mere difference.
Is that an actual ND movement though, or is that just Autism Speaks style parents? There’s the specific example of the ‘high functioning/low functioning debate’, but even that feels like a slightly fringe movement. In terms of the difference vs disability thing, there is a definite case of autistic people feeling (rightly) that their condition is not a thing to be cured but a part of who they are, and so take offence at the way NTs will act like they are somehow subhuman and need to be corrected for it (Freddie skirts dangerously close to this in several of his blogs). However, beyond that point, I’ve yet to meet an autistic person who gives the slightest f*** about any of that difference vs disability language nonsense - that side of things is entirely condescending NTs (I swear though, if I get called a ‘Person with Autism’ one more time…)
"Is that an actual ND movement though, or is that just Autism Speaks style parents?"
From personal experience, it's definitely from the ND movement. Autism Speaks has many faults (like having fallen for nonsense about autism and vaccines), but sugarcoating disability is not one of them.
if you’re in highly social justice oriented spaces, especially nerd hobbies (online, fandom conventions, tabletop games, etc.) there’s a ton of it. at its best, still a helpful movement, but very stupid at its worst.
I leaned to appreciate this when I worked as a psych tech on a locked adult hospital unit while going to college. People in the throes of mania are complete assholes. BUT I would watch them slowly get better over the course of a few weeks until they became COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PEOPLE then they were when admitted. I learned a lot about humanity during that time of my life. Including mental illness MUST be considered when morally judging another human being.
Not surprisingly, your writing about mental illness is always spot on. If you've ever really been around someone deep in a manic episode, there's no mistaking it. People ruin their lives in a matter of months...financially, professionally, socially. They typically don't even really remember what happened, almost like a bad night of blackout drinking.
They might even ask for an explanation of what happened, without recognizing how their actions caused the problem.
It's a lot like a severe form of intoxication, in my observation. The saying about people in the middle of an alcohol binge is that "they aren't themselves." They aren't the same person that the witness knows under the circumstance of sobriety. The sense of communication, common bonding, is lost. It's like the wires are down.
Also, this is an aside, but given you mentioned the whole Manic Pixie Dream Girl thing, I had a discussion about it recently with a friend. I pointed out the relentless mocking of the trope into non-existence was arguably very, very bad for cultural discourse around young men in general.
Fundamentally, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl was a character in a male-focused romance story. A sad, introverted boy has a dull gray life, and meets this wild, quirky woman who gets him out of his shell and helps him learn how to love life. This is in a lot of ways just a gender-flipped version of the standard female romance novel, without all the icky non-consensual elements. They often weren't even overtly sexualized, as it was more about romantic attraction than sexual attraction.
Were they deep? Absolutely not! But was Edward Cullen from Twilight deep? The point of the romantic leads isn't to be fully-fleshed characters, it's to be seen from the POV of the protagonist. And it probably spoke to something in a certain kind of stale, sad, wonder-bread boy. Not to mention absolutely nothing in the world of (straight) male romance has replaced it.
Yeah, it's "what if a cool person wanted to be your friend," or "what if someone interesting entered our boring-ass life." It's a fantasy that, no matter how dull or generic you are, someone will like you for YOU. And the fantasy that the world of ADVENTURE that you dreamed about as a kid and saw in movies and TV but which never quite appeared.
And "Breakfast At Tiffany's" did the trope best.
"Were I Nathan Rabin, I would ask myself this question: why am I so eager to hand blanket exoneration for all misdeeds to the vast, vague, and medically meaningless group known as The Neurodivergent, when a clearly deeply-ill celebrity who’s said genuinely ugly things receives no such consideration?"
You answered that yourself, Freddie! By denying his diagnosis, Kanye West is eschewing any avenue for accountability.
My Inner Libertarian—with whom I struggle on a daily basis 😀: Is _that_ a DSM-5-TR diagnosis yet?—sez you should always take people at their word when they're talking about their own mental status. If Kanye West tells me he is _not_ mentally ill, far be it from me to bestow protected status upon him.
By the way, if you're interested in cinematic depictions of the mentally ill, I strongly recommend "Revolutionary Road."
Maybe rather than being mentally ill, Kanye is just wrong and needs to grow up, mature. Maybe he had bad parenting. Perhaps he needs to be saved, e.g. have a Power greater than himself forgive his sins and provide the help and guidance he needs. Maybe all people are in that same position, we are not who we ought to be and ultimately only God can help.
I offer this simply as a starting point to provoke further thought, not a definitive statement.
He’s also been in a position where most everyone says yes to anything he says than the opposite and has no day to day need to show up for work. That extends your period of untrammeled brainplay a great deal. My dad’s clear break happened because regular structures exacerbated the mental problems. It made the just-under-the-surface break through. Interestingly, his break happened when he was refused an opportunity that would have given him actual power and sway over others. Had he gotten that opportunity, his actions could have had more time in the wild and hurt far more people than his family.
Thank you.
Being more sympathetic to the mentally ill should mean acknowledging that it's more self-destructive, since that correlates with something to be sympathetic for. Taken as a limit, you could say that the limit of your sympathy towards the unwell approaches its absolute maximum as its self-destructiveness approaches infinity.
Also, the first exchange might be received better by progressives if you remade it in cartoon form. Sad but true.
Severe mental illness can cause paranoia, it can cause people to see and hear things that aren’t there, and in rare cases cause people to act violently toward themselves or others, all well documented. But cause people to dabble in conspiracy theories and racist stereotypes that they’d likely otherwise avoid? Absolutely impossible. Unfathomable! We literally have an insanity defense codified in our legal system because we acknowledge that people in the midst of a psychotic episode can commit crimes they otherwise wouldn’t have. But mental illness could never make someone susceptible to racist ideas? What an odd line to draw.
I think what they think is something like
— mental illness does not plant racist/sexist/bigoted things into someone’s brain de novo
— mental illness may remove inhibition, but removing inhibition simply reveals the “true person” underneath
— it is therefore *even easier* to straightforwardly judge a drunk or someone with a disorder like Bipolar because they are showing us “who they really are.”
(Judging someone for this is really not coherent in a worldview which simultaneously asserts that *everyone* is secretly racist; it is *impossible* not to be secretly racist, but let’s leave that to the side.)
There are a lot of mistaken assumptions here but I am most interested in the assumption that “inhibition” is primarily (maybe only) a bad thing, and that removing it is how we see the “true self,” which can best (maybe only) be understood apart from the layers of social conditioning we put on top of it.
I tend to think that for most people the “self” resides in the interplay between core impulse and inhibition. It doesn’t tell me too much about a person to know that they sometimes have the urge to shout racial slurs out the train window (or whatever). The way that person chooses to handle the temptation tells me much, much more about them.
I always felt weird about the makers of Ambien saying "Racism is not a side-effect of Ambien." I think it's tough to fight back against it because you have to stand up for racism and/or Roseanne Barr (who *did* compare a black woman to a monkey).
According to drugs dot com, the "Common" (1% to 10%) side effects include confusion, disinhibition, disorientation, hallucinations, inappropriate behavior, major depression, mood swings.
So I mean... maybe? I don't know. If something is a horrible enough sin then we have to go after people who do it even when disinhibited or hallucinating, I guess? No such thing as too vigilant against that sin.
I think there's a fear that if you can "get away" with racism via cognitive disorder, then other people will just do racism and then claim cognitive disorder. So, hey, we can't accept that. If you give people a shield against being accused of something, some *will* use it. (Ignore the other shields that exist for things beneficial to my tribe.)
I've never understood people who make blanket claims that mental illness doesn't cause violent behavior. Of course it can. If, in your addled mind, you believed someone was coming at you with a knife wouldn't you react with force to stop it? That is actually just rational behavior based on irrational bat shit crazy thoughts.
My perspective is that there is no real hard line denoting mental illness vs irrational thoughts and behaviors. Someone needing cognitive behavior therapy might not be diagnosed with clinical mental illness, but might be even more disordered and hazardous to themselves and others. Clearly there are more definitive symtoms that support definitive diagnosis, but it is a mixed bag. For example, my father hears voices and wears headphones and listens to the radio to block them. However he is otherwise capable to take care of himself at 87. Contrast that to a friend of mine who struggled keeping a job because of extreme vulnerable narcissism that years of cognitive behavior therapy finally seemed to help correct for.
I see just about everything on a linear spectrum of human mental and physical capability that is an inventory of innate sub capabilities... many if not most that can be improved. In my mind, acceptance of those differences along with an opinion that all can progress, is the true moral essence of human diversity acceptance.
I wonder how the adherents of the current progressive orthodoxy on mental health commute. I was 19 when I had my first experience of being monomaniacally harangued about the evils of Asian immigration to Australia for the duration of a passenger train journey in Melbourne, and 21 when I was assaulted at random while attempting to alight from a tram. Both the haranguer and the assailant were clearly mentally unwell. Anyone who uses public transport to any extent will sooner or later encounter some such person whose personal predicament warrants our sympathy but whose behaviour may be anything from offensive to dangerous to people around them.