The New York Times Remains Utterly Dedicated to Telling Only One Story About Mental Illness

you lost me at "nationally ranked squash player"

The New York Times’s war on psychiatry never ends. The paper that wants you to believe that you can cure schizophrenia with Zumba classes and that all psychotic patients can be controlled with a kind word has a dim view of conventional mental healthcare; they usually take a just-asking-questions approach, but you can’t read these pieces without understanding that the paper has a corporate line, an anti-psychiatry one. In their latest missive, we’re told of anti-psychiatry flavor-of-the-month Laura Delano, “Fourteen years after taking her last psychotropic drug, Ms. Delano projects a radiant good health that also serves as her argument — living proof that, all along, her psychiatrists were wrong.” Fair and balanced! Jordan Neely was emaciated, drug-addicted, hallucinating, and suffering from all manner of infections and illnesses when he was choked to death on a subway car floor, a fate which could have been prevented had New York City had the moral integrity to lock the door to his ward. Medication could have saved Neely’s life, as it could save many people’s lives. But then, we’re too busy waxing poetic over Laura Delano’s healthy skin and tasteful fashion sense to think about the sad poor brown story of sad poor brown Jordan Neely, and anyway people like Neely don’t subscribe to the New York Times.

That’s a core issue here, that in their effort to flatter the biases of their affluent urbanite liberal subscriber base, the Times exclusively fixates on patients who are utterly, comically unrepresentative of those with serious mental illness. In that regard, this latest piece truly goes to the next level. Delano, we’re told, is a Harvard graduate and former champion squash player - squash - who, as a child

stood out for her eloquence and charisma. She had grown up in Greenwich, Conn., where she was a top student and standout athlete. A relative of Franklin D. Roosevelt, she was presented as a debutante on two successive nights at New York’s Waldorf Astoria and Plaza hotels.

Greenwich, Franklin Roosevelt, the Waldorf and Astoria and the Plaza, fucking debutante balls…. It’s impossible that they don’t know how this all reads, and yet the piece does nothing to address the immense privilege here. There are desultory waves to the broader reality in the form of expert quotes, asking not to overgeneralize, and then those brief notes are drowned out by cheery talk about how Delano is now living her best life and helping others to live theirs by abandoning conventional psychiatric treatment - if they can afford to pay the $600 a month Delano and her partner charge for coaching, natch.

It’s all a farce. It is a farce that the paper of record keeps holding these utterly unrepresentative figures up as symbols of what mental illness looks like, while they do their liberal fretting routine about medicating people with serious mental illnesses. In the now-infamous NYT magazine piece I linked above, the value of psychiatric medicine is debated purely through the lens of a tiny number of incredibly privileged schizophrenic outliers who, like, live in Sedona and believe in the power of crystals and manage their illnesses from their tasteful adobe homes. Is this a sound way to understand the importance of medication in managing chronic mental illness? No, no it’s not! They ran it anyway. And yes, reading another piece like this made me mad. I confess, I am mad online. But what really fried my noodle was when I realized why this all sounded so familiar.

The Times piece casually mentions that Delano and her nonprofit were already the subject of a 10,000-word New Yorker profile. And her husband, who runs her nonprofit with her - he’s the aftershave model-looking dude in the picture in the NYT piece, the face of mental illness in a $250 sweater - recently received similarly hagiographic coverage from the Atlantic! Isn’t that extraordinary? That this one couple, pushing a contentious agenda about an immensely controversial subject and making a lot of money doing so, have received universally sympathetic attention in three of the most elite publications in the industry? I find that really something. Indeed, it compels me to ask… fucking why? What is going on here? Why give this already overcovered woman more coverage? Why go out of your way to talk about these “dangerous ideas” that, for some reason, still attract credulous and uncritical publicity in big-deal media? (Funny, for “dangerous” ideas.) For what purpose? For whose benefit? Why on earth would this one wealthy Great Gatsby-ass American aristocracy white couple and their revenue-generating anti-psychiatry boondoggle receive such an immense volume of fawning praise in our biggest publications, with none of them seeing fit to spell out what exactly is the actual pragmatic reason why they’re the ones getting it?

It’s legitimately very fucking weird, right? That these two and their nonprofit/“coaching” business are doing a tour of what’s left of fancy American media? I look forward to their fashion spread in Vogue next month.

Yes, I understand - this bizarre elite-media fixation on the Jackie and JFK of anti-psychiatry is less about ideology and more about the fact that the two of them have a good agent, or they’re Sulzberger cousins, or they have blackmail on David Remnick, or something; certainly, the paper can’t stop publishing this sort of thing in general because it so perfectly flatters the biases of tony Brooklyn Heights creative-class millionaires who wax poetic about urban diversity before sending their kids to Miss Porter’s. If you’re the kind of cosseted wealthy coastal meritocrat who has utterly pruned your daily existence of exposure to the homeless and the criminal, then of course Laura Delano makes sense to you as some sort of avatar about what mental illness really is. And the alternative - going into the streets and into the subways and into the institutions and into the halfway houses and finding the grubby, sad reality of actual psychiatric crisis, the ruined lives and the broken people, the violence, the drug use, the unsanitary conditions, the total lack of basic human flourishing - is unpleasant for reporters to perform and unpalatable for audiences to read. So why bother?

There are consequences. The Times piece talks about the direct impact this kind of coverage has on real people, referencing a real patient who says that “it was reading [Delano’s] story in the New Yorker that made him see it was possible to ‘come off the medications and be OK.’” And how many, exactly, are going to do the same thing, and go psychotic again, spend every last dime, cheat on their spouse, stab a coworker, put a gun in their mouth? Does Laura Delano care about any of that? Why would she, when the New York Times is here to carry her water? Who’s going to tell her she’s wrong? Not the Times, clearly. I can mock their subscribers and their fealty to them all I want, but the bottom line is that the taking-three-Baggu-bags-to-the-farmer’s-market contingent is the only thing keeping paid media alive right now. Is the New Yorker going to be running pieces about actual severely mentally ill people, shitting their pants, assaulting their case workers, begging on the subway, with no chance for a happy ending or identity-politics uplift? If they’re going to, somebody’s really going to have to give a shit, and they’re going to have to dedicate themselves to doing truly thankless work for a piece that’s not going to end up doing big numbers on white lady Pinterest. At some point, for reporting on psychiatric illness that truly tells the truth to get done, elite institutions have to choose to make it happen despite how little there will be in obvious rewards. I’m not optimistic.

The two guys up top, on the left that’s Cooper, Delano’s husband who runs her nonprofit with her. On the right, that’s Vince Li, a schizophrenic who stab, decapitated, and partially consumed another passenger on a Canadian Greyhound bus, for which he was only held for six years in a secure psychiatric facility thanks to Canada’s frighteningly permissive mental health system. Is Li indicative of most psychiatric patients? Of course not. Is Abercrombie & Fitch there a more responsible symbol? Not particularly, no, no he’s not; he also lives an existence that has just about zero to do with what most mentally ill people face. But guess which one is getting a glossy photo spread in the New York Times?