Allow Me To Add My Voice To The Chorus of Disgust Over How The Internet Talks About Mental Health

Ye’s meltdown has breathed new life into some ugly and ignorant tropes

One of the strange things about watching the terrible, prolonged downfall of Kanye West, a.k.a. Ye, has been noticing how important it is to certain people that mental illness not be a root cause of it.

To take one of a million examples, Josh Marshall, the founder of Talking Points Memo, wrote on Twitter, “i really hope this doesn’t get papered over at some later point as mental illness because i’m familiar with the DSM-5 and there’s no illness which has loving hitler as a primary diagnostic feature.” 

This is also a common refrain when there’s a viral video of a disturbed-seeming person spouting racial slurs. It can’t be that their mental health problems caused them to do that — it just can’t!

I think most people know that this is a ridiculous position, given that severe, untreated mental health problems can indeed cause people to become disinhibited and conspiratorial and to fall victim to other symptoms that lead them down a road toward bigoted beliefs and/or utterances. If you’re unconvinced, I’ll point you toward Freddie deBoer and Hadley Freeman.