#scott alexander

It’s interesting to see Freddie deBoer and Scott Alexander’s recent interactions in the discourse on severe mental disorders. It feels like somewhat of a reverse of their temperaments on some other issues in the realm of feminism: Scott showed signs of pretty serious trauma around early-to-mid-2010’s pop feminism and criticisms of nerd culture and had trouble talking about it in an evenhanded way, while Freddie (as far as I can recall) was much calmer on these topics; now Freddie clearly and for very obvious reasons has severe trauma around the topic of psychotic disorders and has trouble talking about it in an evenhanded way, while Scott is playing the role of calmly steelmanning each side.

Which is not to say that I didn’t have pretty strong sympathies with Scott’s reaction to mid-2010’s feminist rhetoric or don’t feel very sympathetic to Freddie’s reaction to the movement towards anti-medication normalization of psychosis. But both are cases of someone stating their case in excessively strong language, in an absolutist way which doesn’t sufficiently consider the spectrum of experiences of similar people on the issue that are different from their own. (In Freddie’s case, statements like, “Stigma isn’t even in the top 50 problems I’ve had to deal with because of my disorder” may be true when applied to himself, but I’m pretty sure there are hordes of people with serious but somewhat less severe psychotic disorders for whom stigma is somewhere in like the top 3 problems it’s brought into their lives – not the only or primary reason their psychosis is bad, but a pretty serious consequence for them.)