Mental illness as a form of self-acclaim-by-proxy

Sick people have become a way for others to validate their own ridiculous beliefs and avoid hard truths

Demi Lovato has, by all accounts, had something of a rough life. I mean, yes, she’s worth like $50 million or so, and she’s a global pop superstar, and she can have and/or do pretty much anything she wants, forever. But she also reportedly had a very abusive father, one who introduced her to drugs when she was still a child; that kind of twisted psychopathy can destroy your mind and ruin your life very easily, even if on the outside you seem pretty well-balanced. For years Demi Lovato did seem well-balanced, but then it turned out she was addicted to booze, and coke, and heroin, which is unsurprising given her sad provenance.

Everyone was appropriately very supportive of her obvious need to get clean and get healthy. But then a few years ago she also started talking about how she was “pansexual” and “nonbinary,” that she didn’t feel like she was a woman anymore (though she said there might be a time in the future when she once again felt like she was a woman), and that she wanted to be referred to by plural pronouns instead of singular feminine ones. Around this time she also made a strange, garish transition from a very put-together and elegant woman to a sort of caricature of a 1980s trailer park food stamp recipient, wearing her hair in a greasy mullet and gaining a bunch of weight and apparently trying very hard to look extremely unwell.

Rather than recognize these things for the obvious and inarguable warning signs that they were, we were instead expected to celebrate this transition into what was obviously a sick and unhealthy state. Everyone started referring to Demi Lovato as “they,” Wikipedia changed all of her pronouns within like five minutes of her announcement, we were all supposed to be happy that she could express herself as “fluid” or whatever. It was a big deal.

(This week she has decided that she would once again like to be referred to as “she,” which is of course progress of a kind, though all of this has to be hell for the folks over at Wikipedia, who have gone ahead and permanently lock-protected her page just to make the ceaseless changes easier for the editors.)

Here is a question that is mostly rhetorical: What is the point of all this? Why has our society shifted from one in which these sorts of obvious mental breakdowns are deeply concerning to one in which these breakdowns are celebrated and the people having them are encouraged and enabled? A large part of it, as I’ve argued elsewhere, likely stems from the simple fact that people are scared to be roasted on social media so they just go along with it to avoid being spoken of poorly online. Plus, if you get on board with the gender delusion stuff, people will recognize right away that you’re not a conservative, and there are few things more terrifying for most people in modern American society than the possibility that you might be mistaken for a conservative.

But beyond that, it really does seem to be the case that people celebrate and encourage mental illnesses like Demi Lovato’s simply because they like how it makes them feel. It feels good to take part in what seems like a tonal shift in societal ideology: You can feel like something of a rebel, and also everyone else is already doing it so you get to be part of the in-group (the mutual exclusivity of these two aims is quite obvious, but oh well).

This whole thing is probably mostly just a dopamine hit, in other words. It is hard to explain this kind of reckless tolerance of mental illness outside of that. And in one sense you get it. Actually dealing with serious mental conditions is unpleasant, messy, unforgiving work. Mentally ill people are often mean, ungrateful and cruel, and the work you do to help them is often thankless at best. Then, too, even if you don’t know the person—as most of us don’t know Demi Lovato—then it’s still uncomfortable to actually witness and acknowledge someone’s mental breakdown, for in their brokenness and their total vulnerability we see a pastiche of our own fragile mortality and our own likely propensity for losing our minds.

Better to just loudly celebrate a woman’s spiraling transition into they/themhood rather than admit that she is, in her current state, a terribly ill and powerless human being—like us, oh yes, so very much like the rest of us.