The Weaponization of Mental Health Discourse
what do we do when the language that saved our life is being used to do harm?
I started writing a post about my experience of being raised by a person with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, how NPD and ADHD share symptoms1, and more general thoughts on that subject. And I did write about half of it!
But as usual…
Yep, that’s right! The ol’ brain went on a Tangenty Tangent! Sometimes this happens when I am avoiding writing something, and most of the time I am avoiding writing something, it’s because I am scared The Entire Internet will be mad at me. It’s not a good enough reason not to write it, and most of you who read this thing know I’m not trying to be a douchebag. At least I hope!
There are two parts to my current round of Braining (and I have been thinking about this for a while):
The use of mental health diagnoses/mental health2 terminology to excuse bad behavior and/or abusive behavior, and;
The way the terminology of mental health has been weaponized against not only individuals, but the country.
Note: This week was insane but I am hoping to have the voiceover for this up later this week, so if you want to wait for that, this is a good time to stop reading.
A mental health diagnosis (self-diagnosis included) is not an excuse for asshole behavior, and it does not replace an apology or meaningful amends.
I obviously have no issue with people seeking any kind of diagnosis with a professional, and self-diagnosing where appropriate. I know that more people are getting their information from TikTok than doctors, since mental health care is often not covered and/or people don’t have insurance. There is a lot of really good information on mental health on TikTok (although, please do your research on anything you see there). But of course, some influencers on TikTok….well, they may have a diagnosis, but they are not necessarily talking about it for benevolent reasons, let’s put it that way.
I have seen entirely too much abusive behavior on the internet, and sadly in real life too, with the ready made “I have [insert diagnosis here] and that’s why I absolutely had to be a giant asshole!”. Mental illness does not excuse homophobia, racism, or transphobia. It also does not excuse inflicting abuse of any kind - physical, emotional, or otherwise.
And listen, I get it. I understand why it’s easy to defend yourself in this way. There is no question that I have acted badly, especially over the past several years, and those behaviors were at least in part a result of my C-PTSD and untreated ADHD. However, I am ultimately responsible for my actions, no matter what the cause. I take full accountability for my actions, whether it was entirely my fault or not. I damn near lost my marriage a couple of years ago, and I am still working on repairing the damage.
I take this accountability because I am a 43 year old woman. I am a grown ass adult. My ADHD and my trauma cannot be an excuse to be shitty to my friends and family, and my responsibility is to continue my treatment plan, move forward with awareness, and make amends where I need to. I will make mistakes. I will have setbacks. But I cannot just go “well I’m fucked up, what can you do” and continue being a dick.
It’s like saying a drunk driver isn’t responsible for killing people because they didn’t mean to get drunk, or because they have an addiction. Both of those things may be true, but if you kill someone driving drunk, you are responsible. That doesn’t mean that the drunk driver doesn’t deserve compassion, help, or even forgiveness - but it does not absolve them of responsibility, legally or ethically.
It may be a cliché, but the best apology is changed behavior. Lashing out (online and in person) and refusing to take accountability for yourself, ignoring the advice of your doctors or therapists, and continuing to engage in behaviors that push away the people closest to you - these are all things that you, unfortunately, are responsible for. No one can do this for you. It’s the hardest part. I have a lot of empathy for anyone going through it right now. I know so much of my own struggle wasn’t my fault, but that doesn’t fix any of the hurt I caused, nor did it deliver me from consequences.
As always, context is important. Mental health crises, bad decisions, and sometimes plain old ignorance are not excuses - but they are context. It doesn’t mean that you have to accept an apology, especially if it doesn’t come with changed behavior, but it also can give you a better understanding of why that person did what they did. The answer is usually not because they are an irredeemable person. I think very few people are truly irredeemable. There is a pretty wide spectrum of human behavior, and I find very few people are on the extreme end. We don’t have many “saints”, but there are fewer “monsters” than we think. It is difficult to find the balance between no longer accepting toxic behavior, but also making space for empathy and understanding.
On the other side of this, I have grown increasingly anxious about the weaponization of the language around mental health. The terms that are supposed to contextualize mental health and educate people are too often being subverted by people to make a point, sell a product, push a particular point of view, or even to be abusive. It can go so far as to make people already struggling feel more isolated, and like they are not allowed to vent or express themselves.
Arguing about the definitions of these terms is complex, and challenging the use of these terms can engender accusations of victim blaming, ableism, etc. As a result, there is not as much pushback as there probably should be, and words are losing their meaning. The term “gaslighting” is often used incorrectly and without nuance or context. The term “grooming” is being used to describe situations that are not grooming. The word “boundary” is even being used incorrectly, or the boundaries in question are being used to stonewall and reject people out of hand, rather than have difficult conversations.
I also see a lot of people accusing people of posting about mental health online as “making it up” or “exaggerating”. They not only seek to invalidate a diagnosis, they argue that it detracts from people with “real” mental health issues. This is like saying that one woman lying about rape delegitimizes the claims of other victims. It’s nonsense. It doesn’t escape me that a lot of the ire is directed at women/queer people, as usual.
Unfortunately, there are (and always will be!) grifters and liars in our midst. That does not mean that people who post online about mental health are making it up for clout. In fact, I wager the vast majority are not making it up. If you want to read a long, smart take on this particular topic, Girls Self Diagnosing on TikTok Aren’t Why Ableism Happens by Dr.
Price is thoughtful, nuanced, and expands on some of the concerns I bring up here.No one is more excited about all the attention being paid to narcissism than…than actual narcissists. A friend of mine is going through a contentious situation with a former business partner. The business partner (total narcissist) has been weaponizing the language used to cope with narcissistic behavior - gaslighting, “flying monkeys”, triangulation - and accusing my friend (who is definitely not a narcissist, but experienced narcissistic abuse growing up) of being a narcissist, mostly to get the upper hand. My friend finds themselves caught in a situation where this person is deliberately using this language to find their triggers and disarm them. It is DARVO in action3.
The weaponization and watering down of mental health terminology has actually made it more difficult to combat abuse (especially narcissistic abuse), which was not the desired result of increased mental health awareness. It’s sort of like how the term “woke” - which has been used in Black communities for decades - was co-opted and twisted and ultimately used against the very communities that coined it. The language used by marginalized communities is too often subverted and used against them by people in power.
As we speak, the most textbook example of a malignant narcissist may become President again, which puts a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach, and not just because our democracy may fail. It’s like reliving every argument I ever had with my mother every time I hear him speak. The word “triggering” doesn’t even begin to cut it. People acknowledge that he is a narcissist, and then they go right ahead and give him all the supply he craves. Please think about this next time you want to amplify something he did or said.
The former President is, obviously, not the entire problem. He is both a product of our society and a symptom of something much larger. I know Freud is very passé, but I can’t help but think that the former President is the embodiment of the American Id, and has encouraged everyone to behave entirely in favor of doing what feels satisfying in the moment. He has given us permission to be the worst of ourselves, to take responsibility for nothing, and to blame our problems on everyone else. He has offered us an easy way out of our collective existential despair. He has given us the opportunity to ignore the grief from the pandemic and political/global upheaval we have experienced and to turn it outward. This lends itself quite nicely to the increasingly performative aspect of nearly all of our communication.
Best of all, we can avoid our pesky feelings. For all the talk we have about feelings - how many of us are actually processing them? Our displaced grief and trauma is not only driving our country towards fascism, but further dividing us and isolating us.
How can you teach a country how to grieve when they’ve been given a Get Out of Grief Card4? It’s just a click away to dissociation. It’s much easier to go on Twitter when you’re in line at Starbucks and heap abuse on strangers on the internet than it is to actually grieve the fact that you attended your college graduation on Zoom, or that you couldn’t even hold your grandma’s hand in the hospital while she died from COVID, etc.
The irony of having a Substack about ADHD and also voicing these concerns does not escape me. It is a fact that neurodivergent women are underdiagnosed, overlooked, and discriminated against. I am trying to combat the stigma and increase awareness. But combating stigma - at least as I define it - means that I want to reduce the toxic shame that neurodivergent women carry around, and combat the stereotypes of what ADHD “looks” like. It is not an effort to assign us moral virtue or moral authority.
Going forward with more information and less shame is paramount to recovery, especially when we live in a society soaked in shame. It’s All Shame All The Time. Taking social media out of the equation has aided my recovery, because I don’t have to worry about what people think about it all day every day, and no one is shaming me for using the wrong word, or for saying that I hate ADHD today.
I want us to be talking with each other, not at each other. I want us to be more forgiving, not less. But that involves owning up to our shortcomings. That involves realizing that there is still an unspoken social contract that has been constructed through centuries of trial and error. The religious right would blame this all on our increasingly secular society, but we don’t need a Big Daddy in the Sky to know that throwing a Pret sandwich at a cashier because you think someone cut you in line is okay behavior. I don’t care how bad your day was. 5 We can’t just heap abuse onto people because we are struggling.
I don’t have any answers here, and I rarely write thinking I will conclude with some sort of profundity. As a writer, I tend to ask questions and listen for answers in the echoes I get back. What I do know is that what we’re doing isn’t working. We are not removing abuse from our lives, we are just redirecting it. I say this a lot and I will keep saying it: until we can meaningfully address the root causes of abuse, it will keep happening, over and over again.
Social media went from being a tool of connection and information to a better and more efficient way to brainwash people into abusing each other, and there’s money to be made from it. Lots of money. The ultimate cost, though, may be more than we can bear. In fact, it’s pretty clear that we already aren’t able to.
If you have considered becoming a paid subscriber, it is a great time to do just that! 10% of all proceeds from paid subscriptions from now until Election Day go to a reproductive rights organization, in honor of JD Vance! He will get a personal note sent directly to his office. We are already at over $100! WOO! Of course, the free option is always available, and most of my writing is not paywalled. I also encourage you to share anything that resonates, as that is how I build my readership.
Thank you for being here.
Jen Kirkman’s fantastic podcast - You Are a Lot - has an entire episode on ADHD and narcissism that is well worth your time, and goes into some more information about the connections between ADHD and narcissism, if you are interested (while I actually go ahead and finish the post I started LOL)
For simplicity, I am including neurodivergence as mental health
I will expand more on narcissistic abuse and DARVO in another post.
Our “Get Out of Grief Card” after 9/11 was the rise of reality TV and I think about this a lot.
I saw someone do this at the Pret near work. This lady thought I cut her in line, the cashier was like “no, she was next”, and the lady screamed something at me and then CHUCKED AN OVERPRICED BAGUETTE SANDWICH AT THE CASHIER. It was like Mecha-Karen. The Godzilla of Karens.
HIIIIII!!!!
And yes yes yes to your point about dehumanization. I think about this a lot. I don’t think it serves us to think of abusers as flat monsters. It may make it easier to cope in the short term - to other them so intensely in an effort to get your brain to separate yourself from them - but in the long term it results in this separation between abusers and “normal people”. It’s a lot to unpack.
I cut off my own mother ffs so I certainly support cutting someone off. But just because it’s not healthy to have her in my life doesn’t mean she isn’t a human to me. That’s part of why it’s so hard.
Thank you for this tangent. I have struggled for decades with trying to categorize my mother’s behavior as either a product of her mental illness or just plain old garden variety assholery. I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter as she will not take ownership of either possibility.
Years of working on airplanes helped me get it….I certainly have more compassion for someone who flips out mid flight who’s dealing with PTSD than someone who mixed their anxiety meds with a quart of bourbon. But the outcome is the same, as their ability to do harm in the situation is the same. It’s a serious bitch to reprogram yourself out of destructive behavior even with help, but if you don’t even try, I have no sympathy for you pulling out your Mentally Unfit card to smooth things over. And ugh to everyone using therapy words to describe every negative experience.
(This rant brought to you by six days in a row on the dirty bird)