If nobody else is gonna say this, I guess I have to.
Our cultural treatment of mental illness sucks in ways that people aren't addressing.
The one positive thing that people have begun to do is acknowledge that depression is a real thing, and that it's something that people who suffer from it are usually good at hiding.
To an extent, I get it, mental illness isn't as objectively measurable as physical problems. If I've got a bone sticking out of my arm, it's easier to see than the voices in my head may be.
Still, the mysterious and abstract nature of mental illness doesn't excuse us for weaponizing it in one breath and feteshizing it with another.
It also doesn't excuse us for accusing anyone who says that he or she thinks that somebody has a mental illness is necessarily hateful.
Yes, their have been millions of people throughout history who were just bigoted against homosexuals who blurted out accusations of mental illness to justify treating them differently under the law and send them to camps. We shouldn't dismiss that. We also shouldn't dismiss that it still happens. We also shouldn't dismiss that people have said that trans people should be barred from owning firearms due to mental illness.
What we also can't do is pretend that this is partisan.
The worst person in my life in this regard was a (air quote) friend from college, who is so far left that he makes AOC look like Robert Nozick, who would constantly say that the only reason why I have my libertarian views is because I was brainwashed.
Mental illness should never be a thing that we reach to as a weapon when we're losing an argument.
Still, when people were expressing their concerns that I was depressed six years ago, that shouldn't be viewed as accusatory. They were wrong. I wasn't clinically depressed nor suicidal. I was just really sad because the woman I loved dumped me and was flaunting the fact that she was banging almost every guy I knew in DC. The suggestions that I got that I see a psychiatrist and get evaluated clearly came from a place of love and concern.
We have to be able to see the difference.
We also have to stop tolerating the fetishism of mental illness. You'd have to be living under a rock to not be aware of the TokTok trend of young people pretending to be trans, or have Tourette syndrome, or other personality disorders.
It's also not that difficult to see why it's happening.
This is mostly a social contagion among white girls and women (and some white boys), because intersectionality has made these things cheap social stock. All you need to do is say that you've got something abnormal going on in your head to lose privilege points and climb the intersectional ladder.
We have to come to a point where we admit that we don't know what we don't know.
We can acknowledge that, if a person claims that he's got a bone sticking out of his arm, and he shows you, and you see an intact arm, that the person is lying or has something wrong going in his head, while also understanding that mental problems are less tangible, and still get that self-diagnoses of mental illness is dangerous.
Any and all psychiatrists who sell themselves as the people who will affirm their patients should be taken out back and shot. They're doing nothing but harm. People don't go to psychiatrists because their minds are healthy and affirmable.
They go because they're worried that there's something wrong.
This is a difficult issue. I only know enough about it to be horrified about how we're handling it. I only know enough about it to know that some of our loudest voices on the issue know less than I do.
Mental illness shouldn't be stigmatized anymore than we stigmatize cancer. Namely, it shouldn't be stigmatized at all.
It's equally important that it not be feteshized, or used a social currency.
People...just stop.