“Joe Rogan Calls Dylan Mulvaney ‘Mentally Ill’ After Bud Light Fiasco.” That’s the headline to a Newsweek article published a few days ago. I missed the episode. He also said that Mulvaney is an “attention-seeking whore.”
In a sense, Rogan isn’t wrong about the mentally ill piece. I say that because I find compelling the argument advanced by Thomas Szasz that, for the most part, mental illness is a myth. Szasz was a Hungarian-American psychiatrist and prominent figure in the deinstitutionalization movement. He believed that mental illnesses were not actual medical conditions, but rather problems in living that should be addressed as personal, social, and even existential matters.
I don’t want to be misunderstood, and the point I wish to make in this essay depends on clarity, so I’m taking just a moment here to summarize Szasz’s argument. It was Szasz’s contention that the concept of mental illness was a metaphorical and functional one, used to label and control individuals whose behavior deviated from societal norms. He believed that most mental illnesses lacked the objective biological basis that characterizes physical diseases, such as cancer or diabetes (Szasz recognized that Alzheimer’s disease, brain tumors, etc., which can cause behavioral and psychological disturbances, and therefore are genuine diseases). According to Szasz, in general, mental illnesses were wrongly categorized as medical conditions, leading to a harmful medicalization of human behavior and personal struggles.
Perhaps “illness” is the wrong word technically, but we get what Rogan means. Mulvaney’s attention seeking behavior is clearly pathological and represents a bad role model for young and impressionable minds across the United States. That this man is psychologically disordered was obvious to me the first time I saw him and I said so.
I’m guessing that it’s a mystery to many readers that Mulvaney gets so much attention given how clearly disordered he is. When we were growing up, we ignored crazy people like this—while making sure others were sufficiently warned about what these people were and what they were up do. Our parents warned us kids about the crazy man who lived on our street. The crazy man fired his shotgun in the air when we got to close to remind us just how crazy he was. But keep in mind that the disorder Mulvaney suffers from is not uncommon. These days, crazy people are all around us, out and about in the world. It follows that those with Mulvaney’s disorder are attracted to others with same or similar disorders. The Internet has made it easy for likeminded people to find one another. Similis simili gaudet.
These emergent “communities” function to mainstream disorder, disordering a society that has lost confidence in itself and thus the capacity of self-defense. In this context, individuals lean into their milder cases of the disorder so as to amplify the traits. I would describe this phenomenon as “deviance amplification” if that term were not already claimed by the labeling theorists. Perhaps we might call it “concentrated crazy.” A lot of chat in virtual rooms dominated by disordered minds obsesses over the illness and how one can become more like the desired diagnosis, the effect of institutionalization among those who are not (but perhaps should be) institutionalized. It cannot be lost on readers that disordered personalities have become identities in the era of identity politics. The social contagion effects are unmistakable.
To get technical, then, Mulvaney meets the criteria for a few subtypes of what psychiatry has determined are “cluster b personality disorders.” (Here are some of my past writings related to this: RDS and the Demand for Affirmation; Living at the Borderline—You are Free to Repeat After Me; From Delusion to Illusion: Transitioning Disordered Personalities into Valid Identities; Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds.) Histrionic personality disorder (HPD) is obvious in this case: constant attention-seeking; excessive emotionality; inappropriately seductive or provocative behavior; rapidly shifting and shallow expression of emotions; use of physical appearance to draw attention to self; speech that is excessively impressionistic and lacks detail; self-dramatization, theatricality, and exaggerated expressions of emotion; excessive concern with physical appearance. Indeed, Mulvaney is textbook HPD.
Mulvaney’s condition also indicates narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). Suffering from grandiosity, which is a sense of self-importance and an exaggeration of talents, Mulvaney has always believed he is a brilliant actor and singer, alleged talents we can assess given the ubiquity of his presence. I am unimpressed. We can’t anymore say he exaggerates his achievements, another element of the disorder, since his utility to activists peddling gender ideology has provided him with quite a resume. But if this were the 1970s, he would be a nobody, the crazy man who lived on my street. Only in the current climate can a man like Mulvaney become a celebrity.
Mulvaney is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, and beauty. His belief in his own uniqueness and need for excessive admiration has been on display during his entire journey. His sense of entitlement and expectation of special treatment, as well as his exploitation of others for personal gain, are obvious. His exploitation of others is seen in the way he appropriates womanhood as a costume to advance his own career. In this and other actions, he has demonstrated that he lacks the ability to recognize the feelings and needs of others. Arrogant and haughty attitudes and behaviors are other features of this disorder, traits he has in spades.
We need to be more frank about the problem of those who suffer from these disorders. If we suppose they cannot help being who they are, then we of course sympathize with them. But the consequence to others caused by the mental illnesses of others is not something that can be justified by the illness. We don’t say it is okay for an autogynephile (AGP) to enter a woman’s bathroom because he is mentally ill. It is not the responsibility of the women who need spaces safe from the male gaze to suffer a man’s disordered personality. That’s obvious when we are talking about pedophilia, despite the push to normalize that disorder. Is Szasz is correct, then calling those out for their disordered personalities should become easier, since these are problems in living that should be addressed as personal and social matters in terms of control. Since cluster b types can in fact control themselves, then we must stop catering to them as if they are ill and helpless. But if they can’t control themselves, it is incumbent on society to control them.
We just came through a month where we enjoyed a front row seat to the extent of paraphilias in US society. The desire of progressives to normalize and mainstream an enormous catalog of deviant tendencies that are not merely troubling to witness but affecting women and children of both genders was on explicit and often terrifying display. Nothing is in the closet anymore. The project that simultaneously defines deviance down while desensitizing the public to extreme forms of deviant behavior is in high gear. Now is the time to call it out.
freedom and reason 