"Your support only matters when you least want to give it. " For various tangential reasons, this greatly resonated with me today. I am not an aspiring writer or philosopher or influencer or anything like that-- Just some schmoe in tech-- legacy tech for that matter! Even when your essays come from a deeply personal experience, I find there is always a core that has something for me to reflect on / think about which I greatly appreciate. Thanks for the great writing, but especially today.
Wonderful, beautiful essay. It's important to reflect on the gentler parts of our souls since it is not always our human instinct to do so.
One of the reasons that I am starting to no longer identify as a contemporary liberal, despite what my voter registration says and who I vote for, is that I don't want to hate anyone. I don't want to hate the mentally ill person who says and does enraging things, although I may want to distance myself from them if that is all I can do. I don't want to hate my neighbor, who hurled homophobic slurs at me. I will not hate a young seriously mentally ill person I know of who enjoys shocking his parents and teachers with racist language for reasons I don't understand. I do know that there is trauma all around us, mental illness all around us, poisonous aspects of culture, abuse and people who are simply making bad choices are all around us. I do not accept bad behavior, bad words but I like to be free of, as much as I can, the hating/ shaming impulses that humans are so drawn to.
I don't want to hate anyone either! It's hard not to, personally, when confronted with someone upsetting me directly, e.g. in my face, but it seems to me that the scariest elements of existence aren't really ('metaphysically') malevolent, but indifferent.
Sadly, hatred really is motivating – at least rhetorically and performatively.
I think a lot of people chiming in about mental illness and white culpability and all that bullshit are often a lot like me - falling under the intersectional standpoint of "mental illness" because we're on an SSRI and an ADHD med, but not suffering and, frankly, not having to work as hard to manage symptoms as Freddie does. It's sick. Having to work 25% as hard as Freddie to maintain my own mental health doesn't give me a license to be a dick. It doesn't give me anything except a hardcore belief that if it's hard for me, it's even harder for people with more impactful conditions, and that makes me believe even harder that we need medicare for all.
Anyway, Freddie, if you're reading this, sorry that you have to deal with this shit, and good job handling it.
I agree, and I'm on the same meds (anxiety disorder and ADHD). When I see calls for supporting those with "mental illness" it's often about being more understanding of those who are too overwhelmed to keep up with things. We're called to have compassion for people who miss work, or don't text back, because of their depression/ADHD/history of trauma.
Yet most of the people on Twitter who plead for compassion when they "just can't today" (a real thing I experience, it sucks) are very dedicated to online social justice... and many of them would condemn someone who behaved inappropriately due to psychosis.
Aggression, harassment, saying something racist, saying something sexist... as soon as someone acts out, they lose the sympathy of a huge number of these self-appointed "mental health" advocates. It's a very real thing that I see all the time.
I also kinda feel like the problem is just that our society is really fast paced, and it's hard for most humans to keep up with the pings, and the constantly shifting social situations, etc. I wish we could just say "we're going too fast!" or "capitalism is hard on the soul, let's move closer to socialism" rather than medicalizing the problem.
There's a scene from the third X-Men movie where Storm chastises Rogue for wanting a cure for her powers that has always struck me as a rather telling unintended metaphor for mentally ill communities.
On the one hand, you have all the Storms: people with mild autism or well-controlled ADHD or the like, where their condition does impact their life but in a relatively minor (and potentially positive!) way. This is where you get the "neurodiversity" people who decry any attempt at finding cures for things like autism, and who think having a mental illness gives you a superpower. On the other, you have the Rogues: people who severe, debilitating mental illnesses who would very likely want a cure if they had the faculties to understand the world around them.
The problem is that the Rogues often can't speak for themselves, and even more rarely can they speak in a persuasive manner. I have autism of the mild variety, and I find it constantly gobsmacking that people like me think we can speak for people with severe autism, as if our experiences overlap in any way at all. What right do I have to pretend I speak for the people with autism that prevents them from speaking, that destroys their fine motor control, that disables them to the point they'll never be able to live independently?
Things get complicated when "mental illness" is everything from "a little shyer than normal" to "totally and completely unable to function".
Yes! A friend’s sister is schizophrenic. Went to their house for a family dinner and the bread was passed, along with a bread knife, from which she recoiled. She couldn’t simply eat dinner without confronting her paranoia. That is not the same as what many of us experience as mental illness, not at all and not even close.
But, now it is almost entirely Neurotypicals who claim to speak for the neurodiverse. While an Aspie might be in a non-ideal position to advocate for an full Autistic person, they are likely to have a much better, or at least different and complementary, view from the Autism Speaks mainstream.
This was really beautiful, thank you (and not just because I think that's an unfairly maligned movie). I know a lot of people with mild autism (including my girlfriend) who live full lives. I also grew up with a cousin who had severe autism. His (short) life was one of absolute torture. He was never able to learn to speak. If there had been a cure that he could've been given, it would've been a very good thing. I'm sorry if there's anyone who finds that offensive or makes them feel worse about themselves, but thankfully for them that's not real suffering. What he went through was, and it'd be nice if others had the choice not to go through that.
Were you really willing to go and meet them in person?
I can see how that might have spooked them, especially if they did live in the northeast. They might have taken that to mean you wanted to find them in order to extract your revenge; that you were only being kind to them to get them to give you their address; that you might have had other means of getting their address if they didn't give it to you.
It is an unusual offer. I can understand why you might have been willing to do it, but it is unusual.
It is an offer I've extended several times, and more often than that, people have requested I come. Strangers. And sometimes I've gone. Make of that what you will.
I think that's very kind of you. And I didn't mean to imply you might have done something wrong, or crossed some sort of line, by making that offer.
My only point was that I can understand why somebody might be suspicious of an offer like that, and why somebody in the middle of a crisis, somebody who believes you're out to get them, might find it threatening.
You really articulate a lot of things about mental illness here that are really difficult to get across... it's just so hard to communicate the experience of a psychotic episode to someone who's never been through one, which includes pretty much any psychiatrist you'll ever talk to. I was hospitalized when I was younger, and I remember that for awhile I lived in a sort of frightening dreamworld where every random train of thought began to describe my actual reality. But the truly desperate moment was when I finally understood that I was insane... but I couldn't stop it. You'd think that once you're aware that your thoughts are deluded, you could just stop thinking them, but it doesn't work that way. I agree with the rest of what you've said here too, thanks for this post.
“But the truly desperate moment was when I finally understood that I was insane... but I couldn't stop it.”
I had this exact same experience in a psychiatric unit, except that it was being suicidal rather than psychotic. I couldn’t stop wanting to die even though I had all the time in the world to rationalize myself out of it. I remember feeling insane even in my dreams.
Seeing this with Simone Biles. Not even necessarily by the media, but people on social media either excoriating her or lifting her up as a Hero for Women and Black Women and I’m like will y’all leave her the fuck alone. She’s a human in crisis and she did the right thing for herself. She doesn’t owe anyone the weight of glory any more than she owes us her talent. Heroes and villains, heroes and villains.
I was reflecting on this exact issue a few days ago:
“Something about the media-led valorization of people grappling with mental health issues and trauma doesn’t sit right with me. Yasmin Nair has talked about this a lot. The neoliberal subject is the traumatized subject. Nair has noted that the revelation of trauma is seen as a prerequisite in certain progressive circles for being heard or taken seriously. Treating Simone Biles or Naomi Osaka as heroes does them no better service than treating them as villains, although doing the latter is certainly dumber (and unavoidably racially-inflected, because duh). I’m reminded of a giant billboard I saw in Times Square a couple years ago featuring Aly Raisman that made oblique reference to her status as a sexual assault survivor, but it was an ad for Olay. Obviously Raisman deserves whatever recompense she can claw back from the society that allowed her to be victimized, but the fact that a corporation like Olay sees potential market value in promoting survivorship as a brand association should make us wary. In a capitalist society, anything that can be commodified will be. Now is this state of affairs better than treating trauma and mental health issues with secrecy and shame? Unquestionably! But it’s still pressure of a different kind.
When we talk about these women—and in the progressive media discourse, it’s usually women—as heroes, we are making the same mistake of individualizing the social factors that contribute to the problems they are having to overcome in the first place. As Freddie deBoer wrote recently, ‘Part of your suffering is that you’re trapped between the social expectation to be alright and the social expectation to model being not alright in an Instagram-friendly way.’ (I imagine Britney Spears would agree.) It’s easy to forget that actually, there is nothing inherently ennobling about suffering. Asking people to assume the mantle of perfect victimhood just contributes to their dehumanization. Maybe the next time someone is publicly grappling with their mental health, the best thing any of us can do is wish them the best and then shut the fuck up about it.”
The last sentence moved me to tears. I have a relative who has suffered from mental illness all their life, and has learned to see the signs of an episode coming on. One of them is, "when I start wondering what the government is thinking about me."
I once had a student with mental illness who decided he would undermine the school secretary (a woman with health problems of her own who was struggling as a single parent). The undermining was clever, multi-layered with fake documentation of her work lapses (e-mails, etc). and the secretary had to take leave while we investigated. The student with mental illness later came to me a few months later and explained it was an episode of mental illness for him and that he had felt because the school secretary was an obese person she deserved it, but he realized his actions were the result of his illness and apologized to me, not to her. We permitted the secretary to work from home (before it was an easy accommodation) until the student took leave from the program (on his own, not a condition). This was a situation that campus mental health could not deal with at all so I just did the best I could which was recommend counseling to both. The secretary resigned uncomfortable that this had happened. The student did not return to classes. I was exhausted from trying to mediate a situation that at the time I thought was bullying but was mental illness. I feel like I failed. I didn't have anywhere to turn for help.I gave the secretary a good recommendation and she did get another position where she was ok. I never heard from the student again. I still do not know what I should have done. This was before social media so you have demonstrated a whole new dimension. After this incident I decided I no longer wanted to be an administrator as I felt inadequate to the complexities of human behavior in the workplace.
This type of story is why I included the opening about the minor but bizarre situation with the Twitter account: because mental illness frequently plays out in ways that are strange and disordered, but not at all strange or disordered in the way people expect from mental illness. A schizophrenic person raving on a subway platform is disturbing but expected; the kind of behavior you described strikes many people as "not how mental illness works." But it doesn't work in any one way. It would be far easier if it did.
Yes, that was very helpful in thinking about all this. As a teacher in a university we get no background to help. Mental health services won't come and help, the student has to go to them (not easy to arrange). Most faculty won't deal with behavior that is disordered but some will engage too much. Higher ed is the place where students are not with family support and faculty are not equipped (by inclination or custom) to cope. This situation included the student worker not cashing paychecks to be able to claim the secretary had stolen their money (we had to do a forensic audit). He had been paid but didn't cash the checks.There needs to be better presentation to all people for understanding. We are better at accommodating vision, mobility,hearing but not at all mental health challenges among students. Still, discussions like this help us all to reflect. This WAS the student's reality when he began his undermining of the secretary even if it wasn't what happened in the paycheck situation. That was clear to me which is why I took no punitive action against him. He could have stayed but must have had some time of clarity on the situation and withdrew. I still think about what I could have/should have done.
I really like these mental health posts. I've never had someone close to me have serious mental health problems. The cultural fluff you describe makes me more inclined to follow my darker instincts and write off all mental illnesses as fake or overexaggerated. Seeing someone write so skillfully about the ambiguity and tension at play here helps me understand the problem more, and take it seriously.
Perhaps one day I will have a loved one who has a serious mental health issue, and I hope that reading these posts will help me actually be helpful and supportive to that person.
Ten years ago my sibling was living with me and in crisis. He was supposed to be going to community college but couldn’t get himself out of bed. My parents (several hundred miles away) were angry. Until I told them he’s not lazy, he’s horrifically depressed. He went home and ended up in intensive treatment.
Freddie's essay about how many drugs he needs to take helped me overcome my own shame on the subject... I was on only one drug for a long time, and I would have benefitted from adding another, but didn't overcome my shame about the idea of being "overmedicated" and the idea that there's something noble in being "natural," more noble than being healthy and being decent at my job.
Freddie's essay was one of many things that helped me overcome that shame about myself, but also very importantly, it helped me to better understand the acquaintances of mine who need drugs to keep their worst symptoms in check but then additional drugs to counter the sedative effects of those. That's not overmedication! That's just medication.
"If you assault someone while psychotic our elite culture may find it in its heart to forgive you. If you say a racial slur - and people in institutions using slurs is A Thing - they definitely won’t. What is the basic moral architecture that could by turns treat mental health as everything and nothing, that tells the rich and famous that their mental health is the most important thing in the whole wide world, but which dismisses the possibility that people that violate that laws of their new catechism could be in need of some of that same compassion, that same equanimity?"
A very pertinent question, and one that the guardians of the culture will never ask. To use their own language against them, they have a place of enormous privilege, where they can wear as a holy aegis the garb of Tragic Heroic Mental Illness when it suits, and cast it aside like rags the microsecond it actually presents a challenge or a nuance or - horror of horrors! - having to wrestle with something that makes a journalist say "yikes."
The Twitterati's commitment to mental health is Monsanto's commitment to a clean environment and Amazon's commitment to worker's rights. It's a simpering, cartoonish grotesquerie which diminishes everyone involved. It's the human experience reduced to enough characters to fit in a Twitter bio, nestled between pronouns and @TheAtlantic.
"Your support only matters when you least want to give it"
Beautiful. I love your mental illness posts Freddie. It always gives me a fresh perspective on this complicated issue that just doesn't hand wave away the true struggles that people go through especially when it becomes ugly.
To share a personal story, I have a cousin. The oldest cousin in our family who basically was a mentor to me throughout my life. He was raised by my aunt (a single mother) who escaped an abusive and alcoholic father. So his life wasn't easy, but he was the first in our entire family to get a PhD. From Columbia of all places. This poor Puerto Rican kid who grew up in poverty was able to show the rest of us, hey this is one way you can succeed. I wish I could put into words how powerful that kind of role model was for me.
He got married to a wonderful woman who was like an older sister type to me and things seemed to be going great... until they didn't. He was diagnosed with Bi-Polar disorder, and over the last decade, has proceeded to systematically destroy most of his life. Every time there was a chance for him to press the 'Big Red Button' to destroy his marriage or create conflict with his family, or spontaneously have children with a woman who was a weird/horrible person (she seriously could fit in as a villain in a Neil Gaiman novel).... he pressed that button.
Last time I met with him, he was like a robot in human skin who seemed to just go through the motions. I walked into his house and he was sitting on a couch watching TV. He barely acknowledged my presence. I hadn't seen him in like 4-5 years, and couldn't even get a normal small talk conversation that I could have with any stranger at the bus stop.
It just breaks my heart. I wish I could do something to get my cousin back to the person he used to be. Or at the very least, to be able to function normally.
This is so powerful and beautifully written. It really exemplifies what makes this Substack different from others that cover the woke left and shitty journalism (in addition to the fact that you write about many other topics, like education research, literature, pop culture, the Middle East...)
You write from a place of compassion and understanding for others, even those who have really fucked up. For example, I saved this quote to my phone (from an interview Freddie did with Business Insider) and go back to it often:
"The problem is — it’s just a basic belief of mine — that we’re a terribly flawed species filled with terribly flawed people. And people are going to screw up all the time because that’s the nature of human beings. And it does not make sense to me to have a social system in place where any fault or flaw is going to be jumped on by a thousand people and stain you for the rest of your life."
So many people in elite discourse lack this perspective. They retweet earnest calls for mental health awareness whenever the hashtag is going around -- but they also condemn people when we barely know what happened, let alone what the person was dealing with at the time. Until they get canceled themselves.
Anyway, I really, really appreciate your perspective especially when you write about mental health crises, scandal, and forgiveness. It's so valuable and rare, and it inspires me to be a better person. I also know you get a lot of shit for even having a Substack, so I really appreciate that you're sharing your writing with us despite that.
I second your appreciation of Freddie's compassion and moral complexity even though I come at this issue from a different perspective of believing that humans aren't "terribly" flawed, nor are we perfect. I think our flaws get monstrously magnified and manipulated in the context we live in -- a high-tech, consumerist capitalist society that thrives on human weaknesses like gluttony and zero sum competition and that constantly overstimulates us in ways that, I believe, impair our mental health and capacity for intimacy. A different society might thrive by bringing out our more positive side --altruism, cooperation -- as some historically and to this day do, but those societies are being crushed by global capitalist monoculture.
I think Freddie’s merits as a writer and a human are reflected in the kind of people who subscribe and take part in these conversations. We all seem to be very different in a lot of ways, but the discourse is virtually always thoughtful and respectful, even when heated.
Thank you for this one Freddie. And for what it’s worth, I hope you can grant yourself mercy too.
"Your support only matters when you least want to give it. " For various tangential reasons, this greatly resonated with me today. I am not an aspiring writer or philosopher or influencer or anything like that-- Just some schmoe in tech-- legacy tech for that matter! Even when your essays come from a deeply personal experience, I find there is always a core that has something for me to reflect on / think about which I greatly appreciate. Thanks for the great writing, but especially today.
Wonderful, beautiful essay. It's important to reflect on the gentler parts of our souls since it is not always our human instinct to do so.
One of the reasons that I am starting to no longer identify as a contemporary liberal, despite what my voter registration says and who I vote for, is that I don't want to hate anyone. I don't want to hate the mentally ill person who says and does enraging things, although I may want to distance myself from them if that is all I can do. I don't want to hate my neighbor, who hurled homophobic slurs at me. I will not hate a young seriously mentally ill person I know of who enjoys shocking his parents and teachers with racist language for reasons I don't understand. I do know that there is trauma all around us, mental illness all around us, poisonous aspects of culture, abuse and people who are simply making bad choices are all around us. I do not accept bad behavior, bad words but I like to be free of, as much as I can, the hating/ shaming impulses that humans are so drawn to.
Amen! (I mean that sincerely, not sarcastically, sad that I feel that need to clarify that).
I don't want to hate anyone either! It's hard not to, personally, when confronted with someone upsetting me directly, e.g. in my face, but it seems to me that the scariest elements of existence aren't really ('metaphysically') malevolent, but indifferent.
Sadly, hatred really is motivating – at least rhetorically and performatively.
I think a lot of people chiming in about mental illness and white culpability and all that bullshit are often a lot like me - falling under the intersectional standpoint of "mental illness" because we're on an SSRI and an ADHD med, but not suffering and, frankly, not having to work as hard to manage symptoms as Freddie does. It's sick. Having to work 25% as hard as Freddie to maintain my own mental health doesn't give me a license to be a dick. It doesn't give me anything except a hardcore belief that if it's hard for me, it's even harder for people with more impactful conditions, and that makes me believe even harder that we need medicare for all.
Anyway, Freddie, if you're reading this, sorry that you have to deal with this shit, and good job handling it.
I agree, and I'm on the same meds (anxiety disorder and ADHD). When I see calls for supporting those with "mental illness" it's often about being more understanding of those who are too overwhelmed to keep up with things. We're called to have compassion for people who miss work, or don't text back, because of their depression/ADHD/history of trauma.
Yet most of the people on Twitter who plead for compassion when they "just can't today" (a real thing I experience, it sucks) are very dedicated to online social justice... and many of them would condemn someone who behaved inappropriately due to psychosis.
Aggression, harassment, saying something racist, saying something sexist... as soon as someone acts out, they lose the sympathy of a huge number of these self-appointed "mental health" advocates. It's a very real thing that I see all the time.
I also kinda feel like the problem is just that our society is really fast paced, and it's hard for most humans to keep up with the pings, and the constantly shifting social situations, etc. I wish we could just say "we're going too fast!" or "capitalism is hard on the soul, let's move closer to socialism" rather than medicalizing the problem.
Yes and no. Our current way of life certainly exacerbates mental health issues. I think very few would be explicitly caused by it.
Yes, I agree with that.
There's a scene from the third X-Men movie where Storm chastises Rogue for wanting a cure for her powers that has always struck me as a rather telling unintended metaphor for mentally ill communities.
On the one hand, you have all the Storms: people with mild autism or well-controlled ADHD or the like, where their condition does impact their life but in a relatively minor (and potentially positive!) way. This is where you get the "neurodiversity" people who decry any attempt at finding cures for things like autism, and who think having a mental illness gives you a superpower. On the other, you have the Rogues: people who severe, debilitating mental illnesses who would very likely want a cure if they had the faculties to understand the world around them.
The problem is that the Rogues often can't speak for themselves, and even more rarely can they speak in a persuasive manner. I have autism of the mild variety, and I find it constantly gobsmacking that people like me think we can speak for people with severe autism, as if our experiences overlap in any way at all. What right do I have to pretend I speak for the people with autism that prevents them from speaking, that destroys their fine motor control, that disables them to the point they'll never be able to live independently?
Things get complicated when "mental illness" is everything from "a little shyer than normal" to "totally and completely unable to function".
"the Rogues often can't speak for themselves, and even more rarely can they speak in a persuasive manner"
Bingo! Bingo to all of it, but that's an extra good way to put it.
Yes! A friend’s sister is schizophrenic. Went to their house for a family dinner and the bread was passed, along with a bread knife, from which she recoiled. She couldn’t simply eat dinner without confronting her paranoia. That is not the same as what many of us experience as mental illness, not at all and not even close.
But, now it is almost entirely Neurotypicals who claim to speak for the neurodiverse. While an Aspie might be in a non-ideal position to advocate for an full Autistic person, they are likely to have a much better, or at least different and complementary, view from the Autism Speaks mainstream.
This was really beautiful, thank you (and not just because I think that's an unfairly maligned movie). I know a lot of people with mild autism (including my girlfriend) who live full lives. I also grew up with a cousin who had severe autism. His (short) life was one of absolute torture. He was never able to learn to speak. If there had been a cure that he could've been given, it would've been a very good thing. I'm sorry if there's anyone who finds that offensive or makes them feel worse about themselves, but thankfully for them that's not real suffering. What he went through was, and it'd be nice if others had the choice not to go through that.
Were you really willing to go and meet them in person?
I can see how that might have spooked them, especially if they did live in the northeast. They might have taken that to mean you wanted to find them in order to extract your revenge; that you were only being kind to them to get them to give you their address; that you might have had other means of getting their address if they didn't give it to you.
It is an unusual offer. I can understand why you might have been willing to do it, but it is unusual.
It is an offer I've extended several times, and more often than that, people have requested I come. Strangers. And sometimes I've gone. Make of that what you will.
I think that's very kind of you. And I didn't mean to imply you might have done something wrong, or crossed some sort of line, by making that offer.
My only point was that I can understand why somebody might be suspicious of an offer like that, and why somebody in the middle of a crisis, somebody who believes you're out to get them, might find it threatening.
Sometimes it feels like only strangers could actually help.
Absolutely.
You really articulate a lot of things about mental illness here that are really difficult to get across... it's just so hard to communicate the experience of a psychotic episode to someone who's never been through one, which includes pretty much any psychiatrist you'll ever talk to. I was hospitalized when I was younger, and I remember that for awhile I lived in a sort of frightening dreamworld where every random train of thought began to describe my actual reality. But the truly desperate moment was when I finally understood that I was insane... but I couldn't stop it. You'd think that once you're aware that your thoughts are deluded, you could just stop thinking them, but it doesn't work that way. I agree with the rest of what you've said here too, thanks for this post.
“But the truly desperate moment was when I finally understood that I was insane... but I couldn't stop it.”
I had this exact same experience in a psychiatric unit, except that it was being suicidal rather than psychotic. I couldn’t stop wanting to die even though I had all the time in the world to rationalize myself out of it. I remember feeling insane even in my dreams.
Winged words.
Seeing this with Simone Biles. Not even necessarily by the media, but people on social media either excoriating her or lifting her up as a Hero for Women and Black Women and I’m like will y’all leave her the fuck alone. She’s a human in crisis and she did the right thing for herself. She doesn’t owe anyone the weight of glory any more than she owes us her talent. Heroes and villains, heroes and villains.
I was reflecting on this exact issue a few days ago:
“Something about the media-led valorization of people grappling with mental health issues and trauma doesn’t sit right with me. Yasmin Nair has talked about this a lot. The neoliberal subject is the traumatized subject. Nair has noted that the revelation of trauma is seen as a prerequisite in certain progressive circles for being heard or taken seriously. Treating Simone Biles or Naomi Osaka as heroes does them no better service than treating them as villains, although doing the latter is certainly dumber (and unavoidably racially-inflected, because duh). I’m reminded of a giant billboard I saw in Times Square a couple years ago featuring Aly Raisman that made oblique reference to her status as a sexual assault survivor, but it was an ad for Olay. Obviously Raisman deserves whatever recompense she can claw back from the society that allowed her to be victimized, but the fact that a corporation like Olay sees potential market value in promoting survivorship as a brand association should make us wary. In a capitalist society, anything that can be commodified will be. Now is this state of affairs better than treating trauma and mental health issues with secrecy and shame? Unquestionably! But it’s still pressure of a different kind.
When we talk about these women—and in the progressive media discourse, it’s usually women—as heroes, we are making the same mistake of individualizing the social factors that contribute to the problems they are having to overcome in the first place. As Freddie deBoer wrote recently, ‘Part of your suffering is that you’re trapped between the social expectation to be alright and the social expectation to model being not alright in an Instagram-friendly way.’ (I imagine Britney Spears would agree.) It’s easy to forget that actually, there is nothing inherently ennobling about suffering. Asking people to assume the mantle of perfect victimhood just contributes to their dehumanization. Maybe the next time someone is publicly grappling with their mental health, the best thing any of us can do is wish them the best and then shut the fuck up about it.”
Absolutely. Did you publish this somewhere or just write it for yourself?
Just for myself on facebook
The last sentence moved me to tears. I have a relative who has suffered from mental illness all their life, and has learned to see the signs of an episode coming on. One of them is, "when I start wondering what the government is thinking about me."
I once had a student with mental illness who decided he would undermine the school secretary (a woman with health problems of her own who was struggling as a single parent). The undermining was clever, multi-layered with fake documentation of her work lapses (e-mails, etc). and the secretary had to take leave while we investigated. The student with mental illness later came to me a few months later and explained it was an episode of mental illness for him and that he had felt because the school secretary was an obese person she deserved it, but he realized his actions were the result of his illness and apologized to me, not to her. We permitted the secretary to work from home (before it was an easy accommodation) until the student took leave from the program (on his own, not a condition). This was a situation that campus mental health could not deal with at all so I just did the best I could which was recommend counseling to both. The secretary resigned uncomfortable that this had happened. The student did not return to classes. I was exhausted from trying to mediate a situation that at the time I thought was bullying but was mental illness. I feel like I failed. I didn't have anywhere to turn for help.I gave the secretary a good recommendation and she did get another position where she was ok. I never heard from the student again. I still do not know what I should have done. This was before social media so you have demonstrated a whole new dimension. After this incident I decided I no longer wanted to be an administrator as I felt inadequate to the complexities of human behavior in the workplace.
This type of story is why I included the opening about the minor but bizarre situation with the Twitter account: because mental illness frequently plays out in ways that are strange and disordered, but not at all strange or disordered in the way people expect from mental illness. A schizophrenic person raving on a subway platform is disturbing but expected; the kind of behavior you described strikes many people as "not how mental illness works." But it doesn't work in any one way. It would be far easier if it did.
Yes, that was very helpful in thinking about all this. As a teacher in a university we get no background to help. Mental health services won't come and help, the student has to go to them (not easy to arrange). Most faculty won't deal with behavior that is disordered but some will engage too much. Higher ed is the place where students are not with family support and faculty are not equipped (by inclination or custom) to cope. This situation included the student worker not cashing paychecks to be able to claim the secretary had stolen their money (we had to do a forensic audit). He had been paid but didn't cash the checks.There needs to be better presentation to all people for understanding. We are better at accommodating vision, mobility,hearing but not at all mental health challenges among students. Still, discussions like this help us all to reflect. This WAS the student's reality when he began his undermining of the secretary even if it wasn't what happened in the paycheck situation. That was clear to me which is why I took no punitive action against him. He could have stayed but must have had some time of clarity on the situation and withdrew. I still think about what I could have/should have done.
Other than the opening Twitter anecdote, I could have written this myself. Thank you.
I really like these mental health posts. I've never had someone close to me have serious mental health problems. The cultural fluff you describe makes me more inclined to follow my darker instincts and write off all mental illnesses as fake or overexaggerated. Seeing someone write so skillfully about the ambiguity and tension at play here helps me understand the problem more, and take it seriously.
Perhaps one day I will have a loved one who has a serious mental health issue, and I hope that reading these posts will help me actually be helpful and supportive to that person.
Ten years ago my sibling was living with me and in crisis. He was supposed to be going to community college but couldn’t get himself out of bed. My parents (several hundred miles away) were angry. Until I told them he’s not lazy, he’s horrifically depressed. He went home and ended up in intensive treatment.
Yes, I am afraid of being like your parents...it is an easy trap to fall into.
Freddie's essay about how many drugs he needs to take helped me overcome my own shame on the subject... I was on only one drug for a long time, and I would have benefitted from adding another, but didn't overcome my shame about the idea of being "overmedicated" and the idea that there's something noble in being "natural," more noble than being healthy and being decent at my job.
Freddie's essay was one of many things that helped me overcome that shame about myself, but also very importantly, it helped me to better understand the acquaintances of mine who need drugs to keep their worst symptoms in check but then additional drugs to counter the sedative effects of those. That's not overmedication! That's just medication.
"If you assault someone while psychotic our elite culture may find it in its heart to forgive you. If you say a racial slur - and people in institutions using slurs is A Thing - they definitely won’t. What is the basic moral architecture that could by turns treat mental health as everything and nothing, that tells the rich and famous that their mental health is the most important thing in the whole wide world, but which dismisses the possibility that people that violate that laws of their new catechism could be in need of some of that same compassion, that same equanimity?"
A very pertinent question, and one that the guardians of the culture will never ask. To use their own language against them, they have a place of enormous privilege, where they can wear as a holy aegis the garb of Tragic Heroic Mental Illness when it suits, and cast it aside like rags the microsecond it actually presents a challenge or a nuance or - horror of horrors! - having to wrestle with something that makes a journalist say "yikes."
The Twitterati's commitment to mental health is Monsanto's commitment to a clean environment and Amazon's commitment to worker's rights. It's a simpering, cartoonish grotesquerie which diminishes everyone involved. It's the human experience reduced to enough characters to fit in a Twitter bio, nestled between pronouns and @TheAtlantic.
"Your support only matters when you least want to give it"
Beautiful. I love your mental illness posts Freddie. It always gives me a fresh perspective on this complicated issue that just doesn't hand wave away the true struggles that people go through especially when it becomes ugly.
To share a personal story, I have a cousin. The oldest cousin in our family who basically was a mentor to me throughout my life. He was raised by my aunt (a single mother) who escaped an abusive and alcoholic father. So his life wasn't easy, but he was the first in our entire family to get a PhD. From Columbia of all places. This poor Puerto Rican kid who grew up in poverty was able to show the rest of us, hey this is one way you can succeed. I wish I could put into words how powerful that kind of role model was for me.
He got married to a wonderful woman who was like an older sister type to me and things seemed to be going great... until they didn't. He was diagnosed with Bi-Polar disorder, and over the last decade, has proceeded to systematically destroy most of his life. Every time there was a chance for him to press the 'Big Red Button' to destroy his marriage or create conflict with his family, or spontaneously have children with a woman who was a weird/horrible person (she seriously could fit in as a villain in a Neil Gaiman novel).... he pressed that button.
Last time I met with him, he was like a robot in human skin who seemed to just go through the motions. I walked into his house and he was sitting on a couch watching TV. He barely acknowledged my presence. I hadn't seen him in like 4-5 years, and couldn't even get a normal small talk conversation that I could have with any stranger at the bus stop.
It just breaks my heart. I wish I could do something to get my cousin back to the person he used to be. Or at the very least, to be able to function normally.
This is so powerful and beautifully written. It really exemplifies what makes this Substack different from others that cover the woke left and shitty journalism (in addition to the fact that you write about many other topics, like education research, literature, pop culture, the Middle East...)
You write from a place of compassion and understanding for others, even those who have really fucked up. For example, I saved this quote to my phone (from an interview Freddie did with Business Insider) and go back to it often:
"The problem is — it’s just a basic belief of mine — that we’re a terribly flawed species filled with terribly flawed people. And people are going to screw up all the time because that’s the nature of human beings. And it does not make sense to me to have a social system in place where any fault or flaw is going to be jumped on by a thousand people and stain you for the rest of your life."
So many people in elite discourse lack this perspective. They retweet earnest calls for mental health awareness whenever the hashtag is going around -- but they also condemn people when we barely know what happened, let alone what the person was dealing with at the time. Until they get canceled themselves.
Anyway, I really, really appreciate your perspective especially when you write about mental health crises, scandal, and forgiveness. It's so valuable and rare, and it inspires me to be a better person. I also know you get a lot of shit for even having a Substack, so I really appreciate that you're sharing your writing with us despite that.
I second your appreciation of Freddie's compassion and moral complexity even though I come at this issue from a different perspective of believing that humans aren't "terribly" flawed, nor are we perfect. I think our flaws get monstrously magnified and manipulated in the context we live in -- a high-tech, consumerist capitalist society that thrives on human weaknesses like gluttony and zero sum competition and that constantly overstimulates us in ways that, I believe, impair our mental health and capacity for intimacy. A different society might thrive by bringing out our more positive side --altruism, cooperation -- as some historically and to this day do, but those societies are being crushed by global capitalist monoculture.
I think Freddie’s merits as a writer and a human are reflected in the kind of people who subscribe and take part in these conversations. We all seem to be very different in a lot of ways, but the discourse is virtually always thoughtful and respectful, even when heated.
Agree completely. There’s a lacerating moral clarity in Freddie’s essay that makes a mockery of the smug pieties of the woke.
Haha that was a bit too orotund — but my heart was in the right place.
Too many feelings about all this to write more, so just ❤️❤️❤️