People Can’t Even Tolerate "Cute" Mental Illness
People who claim to care about mental health can't understand Kanye West's severe mental illness. But it actually takes a LOT less than that to freak them out.
In case you missed it, “Ye” (aka Kanye West) has apologized for his years-long spell of antisemitism and love of Hitler, which he attributes to his untreated bipolar disorder. He published this apology in the Wall Street Journal, where he reiterated that he loves the Jewish people and is sorry for the pain he has caused to the Jewish community.
As someone of partly Jewish extraction, I am not really thinking about whether or not I “forgive” Ye. First of all, I don’t think he is thinking about whether Cartoons Hate Her forgives him, even if I am the greatest liberal intellectual of our time, (painfully underrated as many people are saying). Moreover, there is no way to know if he’s truly antisemitic or not, although I think most of us can agree he’s obviously mentally ill. These two things can coexist, but also, mental illness can predispose someone to antisemitic beliefs. In fact, antisemitism maps on tremendously well to mental illness, given that it involves a shadowy secret force of people behind all the ills in the world—perfect for anyone already vulnerable to paranoid or conspiratorial thinking. Such as in the case of famous chess player Bobby Fischer, sometimes this happens even when the mentally ill person is Jewish.
Freddie deBoer wrote an amazing piece this week refuting the idea that mental illness could never possibly make someone say bigoted things. As he asserts, it can do much worse than that. He is, of course, correct. It would be odd for mental illness to be capable of driving a woman to kill her three children and jump out the window, paralyzing herself for life, but magically draw the line at inspiring racist comments.
Freddie already covered the fact that people are uncomfortable with mental illness that goes beyond the “cute” forms—things like anxiety or depression, ADHD, or basically anything that could be shown in an episode of Degrassi. These people often claim to be mental health advocates who want to “erase the stigma” because in their mind, the stigma is having a Betterhealth subscription or taking Lexapro. And if Freddie will allow me to yes-and him, I would like to say this: it takes a lot less than Ye’s form of mental illness to make people uncomfortable.
Even many of the “cute” forms of mental illness—something as pedestrian as anxiety—will inspire outrage, ire and judgment from people who consider themselves advocates for mental health awareness. They care about imaginary people with anxiety, but are repulsed and weirded out by seeing it in real life.
