Bipolar Disorder Is Not an Excuse for Kanye West's Jew Hatred
Don't Be an Armchair Psychologist, Diagnosing and Analyzing Public Figures You've Never Met - Especially if You're Not a Clinician
This post is the twentieth in an ongoing series on antisemitism and culture. See the previous installments here:
What It Means When the Leader of the Republican Party Dines With THREE Antisemites
When & Why Conspiracy Theorists Sometimes Stumble Onto the Truth
The JFK Conspiracy Theory Which Makes the Most Sense & Why It Matters Today
An Open Letter to Elon Musk Thanking Him for the Correct Decision Shutting Down Neo-Nazi Kanye West
4 Stupid Reasons People Don't Take Antisemitism as Seriously as They Should
Obsessing Over 'the Left' Sabotages the Fight Against Antisemitism
Elon Musk Brings Onboard 'How to Fight Anti-Semitism' Author Bari Weiss to Twitter 2.0
Even the Smartest Brains Can Become Infected with Antisemitism
Is Qatar the Most Terrible State in the Middle East? Or Is Iran Worse?
Indifferent to Racist Hate in America, Indifferent to Genocidal Hate in Ukraine
Please, My Jewish Friends: We Desperately Need You Here in America
7 Reasons This Christian Hippie Became a Zealot Against Jew Hatred
These writings are part of my ongoing effort to overcome my PTSD by forcing myself to try to write and publish something every day commenting on and analyzing current cultural affairs and their impacts on politics, faith, and, well, everything. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the late Andrew Breitbart popularized among conservative bloggers while he was alive. I’d go a step further: Everything is downstream from culture. The cultures you embrace determine who you are and who you become. You become what you worship.
So! Apologies in advance: this installment will be a bit longer than usual, getting into the weeds some, and ultimately being a bit more personal than I prefer this series to be. I simply take a very strong exception to people playing amateur psychologist. Especially since such misguided thinking has targeted me all too often over the last year and a half, as I’ve struggled with PTSD.
Over at Commentary, Elliot Kaufman has a fantastic piece summarizing the origins of Kanye West’s antisemitic views, “O Ye of Little Faith: The Anti-Semitism of Kanye West.” The subhead accurately characterizes the piece: “The billionaire star is not just crazy. His Jew-hating politics have a history—and a radical potential.” I especially sympathize with this excerpt here, emphasis added:
West’s accusations are as follows. Record labels managed by Jews have screwed him. “Jewish people have owned the black voice.” George Soros controls the world silently. “If Rahm is sitting next to Obama, or Jared is sitting next to Trump, there is a Jewish person right there controlling the country.” Abortion is a holocaust against black people, and blacks are “programmed” to get abortions by the Jewish media. Jews first came into money as divorce lawyers, and they broke up his family. They took his kids away. The “Jewish Zionists” told his Christian ex-wife Kim Kardashian to start behaving immorally. He compared himself to a 14-year-old girl who has been raped for years and then says, as a result, that she hates all men. He said he can’t be an anti-Semite because blacks are Jews. He admires Louis Farrakhan. A Jewish doctor lied by diagnosing him with bipolar disorder. He has been off medication for two years.
In other words, Kanye West has lost his mind. But that doesn’t explain enough. If West had blamed the Iroquois for his woes, that would be unhinged. But he didn’t. He blamed the Jews, and that’s no accident of mental illness. West found a powerful political explanation for his experience, one that already has a pedigree in the black community—anti-Semitism.
In the previous installments of this series, I’ve laid out my analysis of where antisemitism comes from: cultural attitudes which derive from more primitive tendencies innate to human nature. Antisemitism is an ideology, and, above all, a CHOICE. People do not become antisemites because they’re “crazy,” or because they have some mental health problem. As someone who has struggled with mental health problems for decades, and who now writes it about it openly, I find this suggestion very offensive. And I need to point out that it's also factually wrong.
One of the influences which has most shaped my life is having been raised by a psychologist. I’ve learned so much from my father. One of the lessons he’s impressed on me over the years: those of us who are not psychologists or psychiatrists really should never try to diagnose or speculate about other people's mental health. This is especially true when the only information we have about them is what's reported in the media. And even psychologists and psychiatrists don't have the whole picture unless they are actually treating the person in question! To properly determine what someone’s mental health problems really are, a highly-trained clinician has to sit down with them - often for multiple sessions - and perform an extensive examination.
Despite all that, even trained psychologists frequently misdiagnose people. My current psychiatrist told me in our first session that, in his experience interviewing psychiatrists for open positions at a facility he managed, fully half of them were incompetent - unfit to do the job. This tracks with what I’ve read previously about rampant misdiagnoses.
I am especially sensitive to this issue because, as I’ve written about before here at this Substack, it happened to me. Twenty years ago, as a teenager, I was misdiagnosed with Bipolar II. Accepting this diagnosis as a matter of course, I spent a decade faithfully following treatments for the disorder, despite the fact that they never seemed to affect, let alone improve, my symptoms. I spent a decade growing frustrated enough to begin the research necessary to suspect that the diagnosis was wrong. It then took another ten years before multiple psychiatrists confirmed it for me: I’m not bipolar. I’ve never had a manic episode. I can't help but suspect that any psychiatrist worth his salt could have figured that out in one session, but in fact, it took decades and multiple care providers to determine.
Therefore - given how easily misdiagnoses and faulty analyses occur, even among trained professionals - I have absolutely ZERO tolerance for when amateurs engage in it based on crap they read in the media.
“But hey,” you might say. “Kanye West has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder! What am I supposed to do, research every doctor there's a public record of him seeing?” Of course not. And it's true that West acknowledges receiving this diagnosis (whether he agrees with it or not). But, crucially, the toxicity of casually-speculative armchair diagnosis also extends to amateur assessments of individual behaviors as they relate even to confirmed diagnoses. We simply aren't qualified to engage in that.
We've all heard about the phenomenon of “Dr. Google” - the misconception that anyone with a device and an internet connection has both the same information available to him, and the ability to correctly interpret it, as someone who has spent the better part of a decade in medical school. Actually, we think we can access and apply expert knowledge to almost any subject with just a few clicks. Sometimes our research is correct! Very often, though, it's not. Or, critically, we lack the experience and the context that's absolutely necessary to properly situate the information itself, the source of that information, and the general consensus of the field. And this is downright dangerous.
Engaging in internet diagnostics of a public figure with a diagnosis of mental illness is tempting. It's especially tempting when we really want an explanation as to why, for instance, someone would intentionally say into a microphone, “There are a lot of things I love about Hitler,” as West recently did as a guest on Alex Jones’ Infowars podcast. After all, West's music is still beloved by millions, and, for better or for worse, he is an icon of the fashion world. So why would he say this kind of stuff? What's wrong with him? We need an answer. Aha - it must be the bipolar disorder.
But this is a flawed premise. Just as we can't responsibly engage in amateur diagnosis, we also can't speculate about which of the limited aspects of the person’s public persona can be attributed to a condition. Diagnosing is above our pay grade, but speculating that certain behaviors or viewpoints are symptoms of a condition, while others are not, is irresponsible and pointless.
We simply have no way of knowing. In attributing every objectionable thing West does to his bipolar disorder, we are robbing the man of any agency, even of personality. Surely he chooses what to have for breakfast, what music to listen to, which car to drive. Are all of those decisions symptoms? Some must simply be choices he makes.
Well, antisemitism is also a choice.
So is the real-world violence that often follows it.
Understanding this correlation is incredibly important. So I was really irritated when one of the worst bosses I’ve ever had - Benjamin Baird, the Director of the Counter-Islamist Grid and Deputy Director of Islamist Watch, two projects I used to contribute to at the Middle East Forum - started sounding off on Kanye West’s bipolar disorder as an “excuse” for his antisemitism, and trying to differentiate it from the antisemitism of his preferred target, the Islamist congresswoman Ilhan Omar. I called him out on it. I attempted to explain that he was not at all qualified to play armchair psychologist:
Baird then tried to back up on his despicable comment, claiming that “there is no excuse for anti-Semitism,” but trying to assert that there was some inherent difference between West’s Jew-hatred and Omar’s:
I pushed back, insisting that Baird was trying to draw a distinction that didn’t matter in the real world: that the heart of the matter is that both forms of antisemitism result in the same hate being fueled in real communities, against real people:
Then I made my key point, repeating the lesson I’d learned from my father about the dangers of trying to perform amateur psychological evaluations of public figures, and the fallacy of attributing this or that behavior to the condition:
But Baird just doubled down on his arrogant assumption that he, a political analyst focused on American Islamism for years, knew enough to psychoanalyze West:
I again tried to get him to see my point, that he was - like me; like most of us - an amateur on psychology, and not capable of analyzing West just by looking at his public statements and behavior reported in news articles:
Soon Baird revealed the source of his supposed expertise, claiming that he knew people with bipolar, so he could therefore analyze it in West:
At this point, I was getting fed up with the conversation. So I decided that, since Baird wasn’t going to even acknowledge my point about how inappropriate it was to do amateur psychology, I’d call him out for being the shitty boss that he was:
This apparently stung a bit. He decided to attack me personally too, in a tweet that he soon deleted, but which I quickly screenshot, since it amused me so deeply:
But I was more than prepared to punch back. I have, of course, made my living by writing for many years. The real reason I couldn’t keep working with Baird was simple: he didn’t edit. He rewrote. He kept putting ideas I didn't endorse or believe into my articles, that would run under my byline. I was a mainstream conservative, and he was a fucking far-right nut job.
But at this point in the exchange, I knew what button to hit to really go fucking nuclear on him. This scared him so much that he blocked me afterward:
“run by abusive assholes who treated the women working for them like garbage.” Gee, what might I be referring to there? Baird certainly knows, and it scared the hell out of him, just as it has previous times I’ve referenced the slew of sex scandals to other former colleagues still working at Middle East Forum. I won’t get into the details here, but once I found out the ugly details about it, I resigned from MEF.
Most of the time, when I so infuriate someone on Twitter with some harsh truths that they block me, I do a little victory dance celebrating it:
(Editor's Note: He really does. -SS)
Of course, even when someone blocks you on Twitter, it’s not difficult to continue to see what they’re saying. And Baird decided to again play amateur psychologist - and show just how amateur he really is:
As I’ve made perfectly clear, I’ve never had a “nervous breakdown.” I have PTSD. It’s also worth noting that there haven’t been “many, many people” I have alienated. It’s been a handful. Some people simply aren’t willing to to hear the painful truth about the violence inflicted on me, and how my PTSD has transformed my personality to speak uncomfortable truths more boldly. Strangely, so many of them have been especially vocal about their Christianity. Here’s an example of such a person who, for some reason, decided to jump into the thread:
Hyperbole! “Everybody” hasn’t abandoned me - only people with broken moral compasses like Chris, Baird, and several other people who weren’t real friends to begin with. But at this point, they’ve been replaced by so many new friends who have real compassion and know right from wrong.
And ultimately, after he blocked me, Baird proved my original point about how he was ignoring what I was saying. This is a lie:
As the record above clearly shows, my whole original position stated in my third tweet was that real psychologists don’t do what Baird the amateur was doing. I wasn’t being inconsistent at all - he just didn't read what I was saying.
So yes, I am claiming that, without real training in psychology, and without doing a formal assessment of a patient in a clinical setting, it is irresponsible and wrong to casually psychoanalyze or diagnose people. And just as it’s wrong for Baird to try and psychoanalyze West, it’s wrong of him to do the same to me. People who think they can mentally assess and analyze me solely on the basis of my tweets and Facebook posts are arrogant assholes. And I’m sick of dealing with them.
So! The bottom line here? Don’t play amateur psychologist. Don’t make the dangerous suggestion that the DSM-5 is some useful tool in understanding antisemitism. Those who make war against the Jewish people and the State of Israel do so because of the cultural values and conspiracy theories they wholly choose to embrace.
Don’t dismiss evil as mental illness.