People may defend their mental illnesses because challenges threaten the stability of their identity, clarity, and community
For many people, mental illness categories are more for providing definitive identities and predictability in our chaotic late capitalist society than for mental health. By insisting that everyone falls into a category—neurotypical vs. atypical, ADHD vs. whatever other diagnosis, “real” depression as opposed to intense sadness or grief—we are creating and enforcing a reality tunnel to understand a world that has been made so incomprehensible to us. Also, these psychiatric categories provide in-groups with behavioral scripts from which behavioral uniformity may be imposed. So we’re finding community, meaning, and clarity through the process of definition.
Also, people have a tendency to become territorial over their belief systems, so when someone challenges those definitions, I think it makes people feel like their predictability and identity, and the community which reinforces it (Every fundamentalism perpetuates itself by repetition and group reinforcement), are at risk of falling apart. We are, in essence, constantly BuzzFeed-quizzing each other to find out where our alliances lie, who we can trust, and who we can feel in community with, because without those categories, life on the internet would be much too vast, disagreeable, and scary a space.
References
- Moskowitz, P. E. (2021). The BuzzFeedification of Mental Health. Mental Health: https://mentalhellth.xyz/p/the-buzzfeed-ification-of-mental.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Psychology Status:☀️