Mental Health, Inc.

Apologies for this not being out at the usual 0500 hrs. Eastern time. The plain truth is that I sat down to write yesterday and then decided there were better things to do with my time.

Commentary Magazine’s great Executive Editor Abe Greenwald posted a link to an article on Twitter over the weekend, and when Abe takes the time to do that, I am pretty sure it will be something I want to read.

This was that article. Entitled “Nobody Has a Personality Anymore”, it is one of the more well-crafted and nicely written essays I’ve read recently, and because it robustly supports my priors, I was excited to read it and share it with you. This extended pull gives you an idea of what it is that connected with me:

We have lost the sentimental ways we used to describe people. Now you are always late to things not because you are lovably forgetful, not because you are scattered and interesting and secretly loved for never arriving on time, but because of ADHD. You are shy and stare at your feet when people talk to you not because you are your mother’s child, not because you are gentle and sweet and blush the same way she does, but autism. You are the way you are not because you have a soul but because of your symptoms and diagnoses; you are not an amalgam of your ancestors or curious constellation of traits but the clinical result of a timeline of childhood events. Every heartfelt, annoying, interesting piece of you, categorised. The fond ways your family describe you, medicalised. The pieces of us once written into wedding vows, read out in eulogies, remembered with a smile, now live on doctors’ notes and mental health assessments and BetterHelp applications. We are not people anymore. We have been products for a long time, and these are our labels.

We can’t talk about character either. There are no generous people anymore, only people-pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached, or the co-dependent. There are no hard workers, only the traumatised, the insecure overachievers, the neurotically ambitious. We even classify people without their consent. Now our clumsy mothers have always had undiagnosed ADHD; our quiet dads don’t realise they are autistic; our stoic grandfathers are emotionally stunted. We even helpfully diagnose the dead. And I think this is why people get so defensive of these diagnoses, so insistent that they explain everything. They are trying to hold onto themselves; every piece of their personality is contained within them.

And it’s not only personality traits we have lost. There are no experiences anymore, no phases or seasons of life, no wonders or mysteries, only clues about what could be wrong with us. Everything that happens can be explained away; nothing is exempt. We can’t accept that we love someone, madly and illogically; no, the enlightened way to think is to see through that, get down to what is really going on, find the hidden motives. Who we fall for is nothing but a trauma response. “You don’t have a crush; you have attachment issues”. Maybe he reminds you of an early caregiver who wounded you. In fact there are no feelings at all anymore; only dysregulated nervous systems. Every human experience we have is evidence, and the purpose of our lives is to piece it all perfectly together. This is the healthy way to think, that previous generations were so cruelly deprived of.

One of the things I have become more sure about as I get older is that the fetishization of mental health has not been good for humanity, but especially for America. The most pernicious impact of mainlining therapy is that nothing is anyone’s fault anymore. It is always the fault of whatever malady they claim, and these maladies are either the result of genetics or horrible upbringing, which ultimately points back at parents.

I have a bad temper. It isn’t my Dad’s fault, it’s mine. I have an annoying tendency to seek attention. It isn’t because I didn’t get enough from my Mom.

We are born with opposable thumbs and the ability to reason. We are capable of transcending both our environment and our genes. Yes, I get it. It is hard. But my “issues” are MY issues, and while I may have lived the majority of my given years already, I’ll be damned if I am going to stop trying to be a better person and simply fall back on some bogus, socially acceptable diagnosis.

Read the whole thing. It is majestic.

The Great Crab Feast

Me and Pat vs. 18 Miles River Crabs

That fella there in the foreground is the camera shy/low social media profile brother Pat, or Patrick sometimes. He and his lovely (out of his league) wife Stephanie paid us a visit over the weekend in order that I might provide our annual crabfeast/recompense for forgetting his fiftieth birthday some seven years ago.

Further to the previous post about personality traits/”issues”, it was interesting to hear Steph and Catherine comparing notes about their respective McGrath boys. It seems we are far more alike than either of us was aware of, which seemed to delight our womenfolk, if for no other reason than knowing they had a soulmate in suffering.

The shirt I’m wearing is an image of Ronald Reagan with the words “OLD SCHOOL CONSERVATIVE 1980” on it. Somehow, it had found its way up into the attic for much of the past seven years of decidedly UNCONSERVATIVE GOP politics, but Catherine resurrected it a week or so ago to my delight. Of all the McGrath children (six of us), Pat and I are probably the most closely aligned politically, but he is less of a zealot than I—to his great credit.