Being very mentally ill is always fun and games until you're annoying, difficult, and unlikable. Then you're just a terrible person, because mental illness neverrrrr makes people annoying or difficult or unlikable. :)
I have cancer. Had a hell of a time getting diagnosis and then treatment because I looked much healthier than the average person. 6' 3" 205 lbs, fit and athletic. Clear skin and eyes. No problem today... I now look a bit like someone that has cancer and get plenty of medical attention.
That is one problem with mentally ill people. They look so normal and thus we expect normal behavior. Unlike, for example, a person with Down Syndrome, who can generally be recognized as having the malady and thus expectation for behavior fitting someone with Down Syndrome.
The other related challenge is that people with mental illness often like to hide... want to live in the normal world of normal behavior... deny that they have a mental illness problem. My natural father is 88 years old and got hit with paranoia and mild schizophrenia in his late 20s. He claims that everyone else is crazy but him... while wearing his big earphones listing to the radio all day to prevent the "witch bitch" in the unit above him from reading his mind and remote controlling him. Suggest he has a mental health problem and get ready for a big dose of anger, resentment and denial.
What's the solution here? Understanding that people want to be normal and live in the normal world at the same time be recognized and accepted for behaving very differently because they have a mental health malady. That seems to be the root of the problem here. I have cancer and a compromised immune system. There are many things I cannot and should not do. I am not in the normal range of expected behavior, and I am fine with that.
"It will never stop amazing and depressing me, really, when the public reacts with shock when people with mental illness behave like people with mental illness."
As befits our world increasingly preoccupied by spectacle, distraction and performativity, humans want people with mental illness to behave like people with mental illness - in the movies.
There's not much I can say about profound mental illness that isn't glib, and I respect you, Freddie, too much to want to be glib.
I _will_ say that "The Cut" has delusions of grandeur that it's some kind of entertainment trade magazine rather than a tabloid, though stories like this one make its place in the showbiz ecology clear. Just about any story about Selena Gomez is clickbait (& therefore a kind of exploitation) almost by definition. Clickbait kind of operates on the "Ain't It Awful—But WAIT! There's More" conveyor belt. I can totally understand why anyone with a bipolar diagnosis would get triggered by this particular story.
Man, you cannot let these people get you down, but why would you expect stupid, unforgiving, rarely contemplative people to give you a break where your upcoming book's concerned?
This is great, Freddie, you showed more empathy to Teefey than The Cut did, for sure. I hope she finds relief, it sounds like she's deep in crisis and there's nobody there to help her.
I live close to mental illness, I appreciate you and the writing you do.
The fact of the matter is that we desperately need several Freddie deBoers sharing their own similar insights on the realities and consequences of their own conditions - be it bipolar, schizophrenia, ADHD, Asperger's/autism, et al. - to stem the tide of the "neurodiversity" movement and all its social justice-inflected, navel-gazing, victim-monster BS. We need these voices scattershot across the big wig publications like NYT and The Atlantic and elsewhere to help ensure that we don't drown the very people we claim to be so compassionate toward, very much including the Wests and Teefeys of the world as you mentioned. Very distressing.
That is a good suggestion, but the Freddie we know is medicated and very articulate. Sadly, many who suffer from serious mental illness are not like that, and just appear to be disagreeable and anti-social.
Great article, and I agree with it completely. Perhaps too completely. I’m not sure I’ve asked this before, but does anyone actually have an intelligent “FdB is wrong about mental illness” response? Just so I can see what the other side says?
I agree with Freddie completely on this topic, but I have been exposed to the neurodiversity side of the argument more than most here, so I'll try strawmanning it. I'll focus on the redefinition of autism and ADHD, but feel free to substitute bipolar or OCD.
Basically the argument is that a large portion of the population has been living somewhat difficult lives in ways they hadn't been able to define, and that the medical establishment (read: pay for diagnosis therapists or pill mills in the case of ADHD) has finally recognized the subtler ways that these disorders can present, particularly in women. This diagnosis of autism or ADHD (or especially ADHD meds/accommodations) provides meaning and a leg up for the people who recieve them, and many of them feel that they have benefited greatly from the diagnosis/medication.
At some point that turns into "this is neurodivergence/mental illness that is just as legitimate as any other," not making distinctions about severity because they find that invalidating to their struggles.
We need to bring back good old fashioned British style eccentricity. The Brits have always seemed to have a place in society for these folks. They were the village eccentrics.
As far as I can tell it’s literally just a term to describe the phenomenon of being so interested in celebrity gossip that you make it into a full-on pastime.
We differ on very very few points of which I am actually certain you’d see where I am coming from. I’ve been publicly talking about this my whole life.
Those who are ideologically captured by mental illness-as-an-identity find it easier to escape into the spectacle of what they believe, rather than confront any sort of material reality of illness, because doing so does not require meaningful action. It’s a “path of least resistance” to ascribe whatever affected narrative you want to yourself (or others) as an identity debased from reality than it is to experience illness and accept it as a real condition with contingent complications. More than just escapism, it’s an attempt to reify reality as something that it is not through abstraction, and it leads to delusions pawned off as other people’s misunderstanding or bad faith. Conveniently, that makes this strategy a great tool to scapegoat whoever you want for what one deems to be nonconforming to an acceptable narrative.
This means of abstracting illness and backwards-understanding identity can be applied to other aspects of what gets ascribed to identity. But for the sake of mental illness, the result is an impotent charge against what can actionably be done to care for and accommodate these illnesses at the behest of avoiding those actions. Some people would rather convince themselves there is no illness to be had than confront any sort of immanent struggle, which is itself a questionable psychological state to exist in.
When did this dishonest cosplay get started? As a clinical psychologist who has treated people with psychoses of various types over the years, I 100% endorse your essay. Certainly psychiatrists who are required to do an inpatient rotation do as well. This normalizing point of view does not come from the core mental health community but isn’t being challenged by them.
No one really knows. But there's a lot who point to both the performative nature of online socializing, as well as the over-the-top affirmation culture of a lot of youngsters (or wokesters, if you will) who believe mental illness is simply a normal personality trait.
It's the same with the body positivity movement - you can't say someone who is overweight is unhealthy because it's offensive. For some reason a good chunk of people all of sudden stopped being able to handle any negative reality.
Thousands, if not millions, of inmates walked out of the cage one day and built the lives they wanted. Whether that’s “sane” or “insane” is irrelevant, since they will never allow you to damage or even access their lives again.
“King of Hearts” was about a town where the population was 100% Mad. The townspeople appeared sane because no abled people were around to smear them as “insane”. People were “cured” when the concept of sanity became irrelevant. Something to think about.
"Accommodation" probably isn't the word you want to use here. In the context of disabilities law, an "accommodation" is a concession offered to someone who can basically do their job or hold down their position if allowed to do this one thing that they wouldn't otherwise be allowed to do. "Accommodations" do not extend to allowing people to simply not fulfill their responsibilities. They still have to be able to adequately fulfill the requirements of their position.
Teefey doesn't need "accommodation." From all appearances there is no "accommodation" that would permit her to satisfactorily perform her duties as CEO. She needs someone--probably her daughter, who appears to be in a position to call such shots--to simply recognize that Teefey simply cannot handle that kind of responsibility and will probably never be able to. It may not be her "fault," morally speaking, but it's still true, and no amount of "accommodation" will change that fact.
We had someone work for us who would say mean, often racist things in the office, who would sometimes fall asleep in meetings (we suspected sleepiness was due to medication they were taking), and who would often get oddly aggressive / defensive about QA finding defects in their work, and just generally be a very disagreeable sort of person.
At what point does "accommodation" become a weird sort of suicide pact? I have great compassion for this person; I'm certain their life was very difficult through no (or at least quite limited) fault of their own. It's also true that they dragged down the productivity of everyone around them, and made the office environment feel hostile. At what point does one say "we need to find a different vocation for you" out of compassion? Because I doubt it's particularly good for this person to be in an environment where everyone is by turns frustrated with and revulsed by them. And on the same token it was extremely difficult to fire them precisely because of the mental illness (we didn't fire them; they ended up being one of a bunch of people let go during a layoff).
Right. Then again, we don't even like to fire people for just being bad at their jobs, either. If we can't do that, trying to do the same thing with genuine mental illness, which does have embedded legal protections, is like getting turned down for $5 and immediately asking for $100.
You are mistaking a feature for a bug. The whole _purpose_ of performative ally-ship (not just in mental health, but all social issues) is to allow the elites to feel like they are solving a problem without actually solving a problem. For instance, we applaud the success of a racial minority person and clutch our pearls over the minor indignities of discrimination they might have faced in an otherwise privileged life; that's so much easier than grappling with ugly, complicated, intertwined issues of poverty, violence, and incarceration of minorities. So much more with the mentally ill, who immediately become cloaked by a "somebody-else's-problem" field the moment they become scary and uncool.
This is why I find it distasteful to disclose my own history with mental illness in any situation that doesn't truly warrant it, like when speaking to the doctor (and yes, I realize I'm sort of doing that right now). My mental illness has surely wreaked havoc on my life, yet at the end of the day, I live a relatively-stable and comfortable life, steadily pursuing my goals and, slowly, perhaps, achieving them. Why should I go out of my way, as many of peers do, to "celebrate" an illness that has only tried to hold me back - one that I intentionally go far out of my way to minimize in impact as much as possible? Especially when I know that there are others out there struggling with the same or worse, who haven't got the experiences and privileges I've gained over the years. It would be an insult to my involuntarily-held 18-year-old self, crying on the floor of the behavioral control unit, for my current self to announce to any and all comers that I am mentally ill. I am ashamed of how my illness has shaped me - and while I'm not sure that my shame is the right response, I know that running the opposite direction towards pride is, well, insane.
I am thinking about this especially in the context of testing accommodations for the LSAT, which I hope to take several times in the next year. I have not requested accommodations because I do not need them; I am already capable of achieving a high score within the regular constraints of the test - but I may be in the minority, here. LSAC is notoriously easy to acquire accommodations from (far easier than, say, the state Bar, a fact that ought to be of great importance to those pre-law students seeking accommodations); given the competitive nature of the legal field and lawyers, obviously there is tremendous incentive for prospective students to seek accommodations.
It all just feels very grubby, very gross. Accommodations are a great thing - but in the well-intentioned effort to avoid constantly interrogating disabled people about their disabilities, we have opened the floodgates to abuse, primarily by comfortable PMC-types and their children, who have the resources and time to acquire a doctor's note or a psychiatrist's opinion with relative ease. And I am sure that there are many millions of conservatives in our society who see this abuse and claim that it justifies curtailing accommodations entirely... why are we doing the devil's work for him?
I fear for what this all means, for my chosen profession, and for society at large.
I think the world would be better served if people stopped feeling ashamed or proud of conditions and characteristics they have no control over. Why should someone feel proud or ashamed of being disabled, Black, gay, straight or what have you? None of this is under your control. It seems certainly fair however, to feel proud of what you've done to lead a good life despite obstacles your body or society has put in your way. Maybe I'm weird but I've never really understood the "Pride" movements. If you allow pride to exist for immutable characteristic you've also created an opening for its nasty doppelganger shame.
I think you put it succinctly - as I said, I know shame probably isn't the right response.
However, I must push back on your comment about not understanding "Pride", at least as it relates to LGBTQ people.
These immutable characteristics have formed the basis of a systematic oppression that was rooted explicitly in the shaming of individuals who were not straight or not cis. In this case, the rallying call of "pride" is rooted in that shared historical experience, and acts as a direct rejection not only of oppression, but of the manner in which that oppression is enforced.
While pride and shame may be opposites, there is no basis for claiming that one necessarily precipitates the other. For example, there is "black pride" - which in practice is less about celebrating the sheer melanin content in one's skin, and more about celebrating surviving and even overcoming centuries of slavery and discrimination.
To bring it full circle, I really do think you nailed it when you wrote that it seems fair to feel proud of what one has done to lead a good life in spite of the obstacles in our way. Likewise, LGBTQ pride has always been rooted in that community's unashamed love for one another in spite of the social and legal barriers in their way.
It's a tricky and nuanced thing, forming an identity, a core idea or creed to build one's self around. My peers have my sympathy. But I think they're rooting their pride in the wrong thing. It is precisely because I am proud of overcoming whatever struggles I may have had in the past that it feels self-effacing to parade those struggles as the basis of my identity.
Oh I know all the various pride movements have formed in opposition to the very real discrimination and oppression of certain groups of people. No dispute with you there at all. It's just my hope that sometime, obviously not in the next 3.5 years, that our society becomes so fully accepting everyone, regardless of race, sexual orientation, disability yada yada, that pride movements become mostly obsolete because they simply aren't needed. Although maybe keep the Gay Pride Parades because they look like a lot of fun. So my comment was based mostly on my pollyannaish ideal world.
Being very mentally ill is always fun and games until you're annoying, difficult, and unlikable. Then you're just a terrible person, because mental illness neverrrrr makes people annoying or difficult or unlikable. :)
I have cancer. Had a hell of a time getting diagnosis and then treatment because I looked much healthier than the average person. 6' 3" 205 lbs, fit and athletic. Clear skin and eyes. No problem today... I now look a bit like someone that has cancer and get plenty of medical attention.
That is one problem with mentally ill people. They look so normal and thus we expect normal behavior. Unlike, for example, a person with Down Syndrome, who can generally be recognized as having the malady and thus expectation for behavior fitting someone with Down Syndrome.
The other related challenge is that people with mental illness often like to hide... want to live in the normal world of normal behavior... deny that they have a mental illness problem. My natural father is 88 years old and got hit with paranoia and mild schizophrenia in his late 20s. He claims that everyone else is crazy but him... while wearing his big earphones listing to the radio all day to prevent the "witch bitch" in the unit above him from reading his mind and remote controlling him. Suggest he has a mental health problem and get ready for a big dose of anger, resentment and denial.
What's the solution here? Understanding that people want to be normal and live in the normal world at the same time be recognized and accepted for behaving very differently because they have a mental health malady. That seems to be the root of the problem here. I have cancer and a compromised immune system. There are many things I cannot and should not do. I am not in the normal range of expected behavior, and I am fine with that.
Many years.+
Yeah. Wish there were options besides "try to mask well enough to get treated as Normal" or "live cut off from humanity."
"It will never stop amazing and depressing me, really, when the public reacts with shock when people with mental illness behave like people with mental illness."
As befits our world increasingly preoccupied by spectacle, distraction and performativity, humans want people with mental illness to behave like people with mental illness - in the movies.
There's not much I can say about profound mental illness that isn't glib, and I respect you, Freddie, too much to want to be glib.
I _will_ say that "The Cut" has delusions of grandeur that it's some kind of entertainment trade magazine rather than a tabloid, though stories like this one make its place in the showbiz ecology clear. Just about any story about Selena Gomez is clickbait (& therefore a kind of exploitation) almost by definition. Clickbait kind of operates on the "Ain't It Awful—But WAIT! There's More" conveyor belt. I can totally understand why anyone with a bipolar diagnosis would get triggered by this particular story.
"If it Suffers, it Buffers" would be a great epithet except I don't think websites buffer much anyway
There's always money in rubbernecking.
Man, you cannot let these people get you down, but why would you expect stupid, unforgiving, rarely contemplative people to give you a break where your upcoming book's concerned?
This is great, Freddie, you showed more empathy to Teefey than The Cut did, for sure. I hope she finds relief, it sounds like she's deep in crisis and there's nobody there to help her.
I live close to mental illness, I appreciate you and the writing you do.
I hope your book does really well.
The fact of the matter is that we desperately need several Freddie deBoers sharing their own similar insights on the realities and consequences of their own conditions - be it bipolar, schizophrenia, ADHD, Asperger's/autism, et al. - to stem the tide of the "neurodiversity" movement and all its social justice-inflected, navel-gazing, victim-monster BS. We need these voices scattershot across the big wig publications like NYT and The Atlantic and elsewhere to help ensure that we don't drown the very people we claim to be so compassionate toward, very much including the Wests and Teefeys of the world as you mentioned. Very distressing.
That is a good suggestion, but the Freddie we know is medicated and very articulate. Sadly, many who suffer from serious mental illness are not like that, and just appear to be disagreeable and anti-social.
Great article, and I agree with it completely. Perhaps too completely. I’m not sure I’ve asked this before, but does anyone actually have an intelligent “FdB is wrong about mental illness” response? Just so I can see what the other side says?
I agree with Freddie completely on this topic, but I have been exposed to the neurodiversity side of the argument more than most here, so I'll try strawmanning it. I'll focus on the redefinition of autism and ADHD, but feel free to substitute bipolar or OCD.
Basically the argument is that a large portion of the population has been living somewhat difficult lives in ways they hadn't been able to define, and that the medical establishment (read: pay for diagnosis therapists or pill mills in the case of ADHD) has finally recognized the subtler ways that these disorders can present, particularly in women. This diagnosis of autism or ADHD (or especially ADHD meds/accommodations) provides meaning and a leg up for the people who recieve them, and many of them feel that they have benefited greatly from the diagnosis/medication.
At some point that turns into "this is neurodivergence/mental illness that is just as legitimate as any other," not making distinctions about severity because they find that invalidating to their struggles.
We need to bring back good old fashioned British style eccentricity. The Brits have always seemed to have a place in society for these folks. They were the village eccentrics.
The psychiatrist-blogger Scott Alexander pushed back convincingly against Freddie's general enthusiasm for involuntary commitment.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-include-in
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-mentally
I would also recommend this piece, which is not a response so much as a very different perspective:
https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/on-mental-hospitals
Also, what the hell is "fauxmoi"? I googled it but I don't quite understand.
As far as I can tell it’s literally just a term to describe the phenomenon of being so interested in celebrity gossip that you make it into a full-on pastime.
Your guess is as good as mine.
Fauxmoi is a celebrity gossip subreddit.
We differ on very very few points of which I am actually certain you’d see where I am coming from. I’ve been publicly talking about this my whole life.
Well done.
Those who are ideologically captured by mental illness-as-an-identity find it easier to escape into the spectacle of what they believe, rather than confront any sort of material reality of illness, because doing so does not require meaningful action. It’s a “path of least resistance” to ascribe whatever affected narrative you want to yourself (or others) as an identity debased from reality than it is to experience illness and accept it as a real condition with contingent complications. More than just escapism, it’s an attempt to reify reality as something that it is not through abstraction, and it leads to delusions pawned off as other people’s misunderstanding or bad faith. Conveniently, that makes this strategy a great tool to scapegoat whoever you want for what one deems to be nonconforming to an acceptable narrative.
This means of abstracting illness and backwards-understanding identity can be applied to other aspects of what gets ascribed to identity. But for the sake of mental illness, the result is an impotent charge against what can actionably be done to care for and accommodate these illnesses at the behest of avoiding those actions. Some people would rather convince themselves there is no illness to be had than confront any sort of immanent struggle, which is itself a questionable psychological state to exist in.
When did this dishonest cosplay get started? As a clinical psychologist who has treated people with psychoses of various types over the years, I 100% endorse your essay. Certainly psychiatrists who are required to do an inpatient rotation do as well. This normalizing point of view does not come from the core mental health community but isn’t being challenged by them.
No one really knows. But there's a lot who point to both the performative nature of online socializing, as well as the over-the-top affirmation culture of a lot of youngsters (or wokesters, if you will) who believe mental illness is simply a normal personality trait.
It's the same with the body positivity movement - you can't say someone who is overweight is unhealthy because it's offensive. For some reason a good chunk of people all of sudden stopped being able to handle any negative reality.
Yes, of course, but I think it started much earlier in the popular culture….?
Thinking of Alan Bates movie King of Hearts in 1966 in which inmates in an asylum were portrayed as the “sane” ones….
Thousands, if not millions, of inmates walked out of the cage one day and built the lives they wanted. Whether that’s “sane” or “insane” is irrelevant, since they will never allow you to damage or even access their lives again.
I have no idea what you are referring to here. Care to be more specific? I referenced a film?
“King of Hearts” was about a town where the population was 100% Mad. The townspeople appeared sane because no abled people were around to smear them as “insane”. People were “cured” when the concept of sanity became irrelevant. Something to think about.
You’re getting all of your exposure to Mad people from one place, controlled by you. Care to “challenge” that one?
You have no idea what are my “sources.” Don’t presume.
“The collision of girlbossery and debilitating mental illness is ugly indeed”
💯 it’s so painful to watch these crises unfold publicly
"Accommodation" probably isn't the word you want to use here. In the context of disabilities law, an "accommodation" is a concession offered to someone who can basically do their job or hold down their position if allowed to do this one thing that they wouldn't otherwise be allowed to do. "Accommodations" do not extend to allowing people to simply not fulfill their responsibilities. They still have to be able to adequately fulfill the requirements of their position.
Teefey doesn't need "accommodation." From all appearances there is no "accommodation" that would permit her to satisfactorily perform her duties as CEO. She needs someone--probably her daughter, who appears to be in a position to call such shots--to simply recognize that Teefey simply cannot handle that kind of responsibility and will probably never be able to. It may not be her "fault," morally speaking, but it's still true, and no amount of "accommodation" will change that fact.
We had someone work for us who would say mean, often racist things in the office, who would sometimes fall asleep in meetings (we suspected sleepiness was due to medication they were taking), and who would often get oddly aggressive / defensive about QA finding defects in their work, and just generally be a very disagreeable sort of person.
At what point does "accommodation" become a weird sort of suicide pact? I have great compassion for this person; I'm certain their life was very difficult through no (or at least quite limited) fault of their own. It's also true that they dragged down the productivity of everyone around them, and made the office environment feel hostile. At what point does one say "we need to find a different vocation for you" out of compassion? Because I doubt it's particularly good for this person to be in an environment where everyone is by turns frustrated with and revulsed by them. And on the same token it was extremely difficult to fire them precisely because of the mental illness (we didn't fire them; they ended up being one of a bunch of people let go during a layoff).
Right. Then again, we don't even like to fire people for just being bad at their jobs, either. If we can't do that, trying to do the same thing with genuine mental illness, which does have embedded legal protections, is like getting turned down for $5 and immediately asking for $100.
You are mistaking a feature for a bug. The whole _purpose_ of performative ally-ship (not just in mental health, but all social issues) is to allow the elites to feel like they are solving a problem without actually solving a problem. For instance, we applaud the success of a racial minority person and clutch our pearls over the minor indignities of discrimination they might have faced in an otherwise privileged life; that's so much easier than grappling with ugly, complicated, intertwined issues of poverty, violence, and incarceration of minorities. So much more with the mentally ill, who immediately become cloaked by a "somebody-else's-problem" field the moment they become scary and uncool.
This is why I find it distasteful to disclose my own history with mental illness in any situation that doesn't truly warrant it, like when speaking to the doctor (and yes, I realize I'm sort of doing that right now). My mental illness has surely wreaked havoc on my life, yet at the end of the day, I live a relatively-stable and comfortable life, steadily pursuing my goals and, slowly, perhaps, achieving them. Why should I go out of my way, as many of peers do, to "celebrate" an illness that has only tried to hold me back - one that I intentionally go far out of my way to minimize in impact as much as possible? Especially when I know that there are others out there struggling with the same or worse, who haven't got the experiences and privileges I've gained over the years. It would be an insult to my involuntarily-held 18-year-old self, crying on the floor of the behavioral control unit, for my current self to announce to any and all comers that I am mentally ill. I am ashamed of how my illness has shaped me - and while I'm not sure that my shame is the right response, I know that running the opposite direction towards pride is, well, insane.
I am thinking about this especially in the context of testing accommodations for the LSAT, which I hope to take several times in the next year. I have not requested accommodations because I do not need them; I am already capable of achieving a high score within the regular constraints of the test - but I may be in the minority, here. LSAC is notoriously easy to acquire accommodations from (far easier than, say, the state Bar, a fact that ought to be of great importance to those pre-law students seeking accommodations); given the competitive nature of the legal field and lawyers, obviously there is tremendous incentive for prospective students to seek accommodations.
It all just feels very grubby, very gross. Accommodations are a great thing - but in the well-intentioned effort to avoid constantly interrogating disabled people about their disabilities, we have opened the floodgates to abuse, primarily by comfortable PMC-types and their children, who have the resources and time to acquire a doctor's note or a psychiatrist's opinion with relative ease. And I am sure that there are many millions of conservatives in our society who see this abuse and claim that it justifies curtailing accommodations entirely... why are we doing the devil's work for him?
I fear for what this all means, for my chosen profession, and for society at large.
I think the world would be better served if people stopped feeling ashamed or proud of conditions and characteristics they have no control over. Why should someone feel proud or ashamed of being disabled, Black, gay, straight or what have you? None of this is under your control. It seems certainly fair however, to feel proud of what you've done to lead a good life despite obstacles your body or society has put in your way. Maybe I'm weird but I've never really understood the "Pride" movements. If you allow pride to exist for immutable characteristic you've also created an opening for its nasty doppelganger shame.
I think you put it succinctly - as I said, I know shame probably isn't the right response.
However, I must push back on your comment about not understanding "Pride", at least as it relates to LGBTQ people.
These immutable characteristics have formed the basis of a systematic oppression that was rooted explicitly in the shaming of individuals who were not straight or not cis. In this case, the rallying call of "pride" is rooted in that shared historical experience, and acts as a direct rejection not only of oppression, but of the manner in which that oppression is enforced.
While pride and shame may be opposites, there is no basis for claiming that one necessarily precipitates the other. For example, there is "black pride" - which in practice is less about celebrating the sheer melanin content in one's skin, and more about celebrating surviving and even overcoming centuries of slavery and discrimination.
To bring it full circle, I really do think you nailed it when you wrote that it seems fair to feel proud of what one has done to lead a good life in spite of the obstacles in our way. Likewise, LGBTQ pride has always been rooted in that community's unashamed love for one another in spite of the social and legal barriers in their way.
It's a tricky and nuanced thing, forming an identity, a core idea or creed to build one's self around. My peers have my sympathy. But I think they're rooting their pride in the wrong thing. It is precisely because I am proud of overcoming whatever struggles I may have had in the past that it feels self-effacing to parade those struggles as the basis of my identity.
Oh I know all the various pride movements have formed in opposition to the very real discrimination and oppression of certain groups of people. No dispute with you there at all. It's just my hope that sometime, obviously not in the next 3.5 years, that our society becomes so fully accepting everyone, regardless of race, sexual orientation, disability yada yada, that pride movements become mostly obsolete because they simply aren't needed. Although maybe keep the Gay Pride Parades because they look like a lot of fun. So my comment was based mostly on my pollyannaish ideal world.