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HermitSongs's avatar

Remember the context here is the president of the United States talking about summarily imprisoning people with mental illness. The answer to that is not, “Well then let’s define his supporters as mentally ill.” It’s that institutionalization has historically been barbarically cruel and is generally the least effective way to treat mental illness long-term, so let’s stop talking about doing that to ANYONE.

And just take a look at the stigma you’ve adopted in your own language. You are defining “mentally ill” as against “normal.” Since when do we call people with illnesses “abnormal”? Are people with diabetes “abnormal”? Do we call people “abnormal” when they get cancer? The point is we need to strip “mental illness” of the absurd moral value judgments that are regularly attached to it. You don’t stop stigma by inaccurately applying a medical diagnosis to the worst-behaved people you can think of. We’ve come a long way in the way we talk about depression and anxiety, but there are diagnoses like bipolar and schizophrenia that are still horribly stigmatized, and continuing to blur the definition of mental illness to include people you’re making a moral judgment about really, really doesn’t help.

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LeighBowery'sLuxuryComedy's avatar

I'm with you on this. I think its interesting that the right is tacitly admitting that their most fevered, hardcore supporters are, in fact, mentally ill. That to hold to an ideology of hatred, to see other fellow human beings as somehow Less Than because of skin tone, religious affiliation, sexual or gender orientation etc., is in fact a mental aberration. As with virtually every other proclamation that comes out of this midden heap of an administration, I don't think they've fully thought this one through.

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