In mid 2018 I received an odd email. The emailer identified themselves as a writer and journalist. They told me that they had found my secret Twitter account and were going to expose me. Having people “find” my supposed secret Twitter has not been an entirely uncommon experience since I deleted my account four years ago. I had probably already gotten such emails a couple times when I received this troubling one. But the half-dozen or so emails or messages I have received of this type since 2017 have mostly all been conspiratorial, not accusatory - “hey dude, I get that you can’t be public about this, but I’m like 90% sure I found your secret Twitter account, can you let me know if it’s really you?, I already follow it.” I suppose there are uncomfortable things that could be said about people being unable to imagine someone not on that platform, but anyway - I’ve always told them, no, sorry, I don’t have a secret Twitter account, you’re mistaken. I have never been remotely tempted to make one. Not after everything that happened.
"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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Too many feelings about all this to write more, so just ❤️❤️❤️