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Key points
- Sarah Huckabee Sanders called the "woke left' crazy. Commentators call Santos crazy. What does it mean?
- Of the stories we tell about mental illness, only one is positive.
- We believe “crazy” is a basket that holds disagreeable things.
I can’t stop reading about George Santos. The man with his pants on fire. Or, maybe more interesting, the man whose trousers seem totally flame-retardant.
I am a card-carrying madwoman who writes about psychosis. I’m used to disbelief. I’ve had a boss deal with a professional disagreement by telling coworkers I was crazy. I had my own reports of my body disbelieved by medicine. I think a lot about the subject of credibility.
The Distant-Diagnosis Game
When Santos’ story broke, I waited for the start of that media parlor game—finding the new Congressman a diagnosis. (A game that’s soared with and after the Trump presidency.) My wait wasn’t long. I’ve seen Santos distant-diagnosed with narcissistic personality, sociopathy, and detachment from reality.
In a CNN story, professionals lamented the lack of a disease category for pathological lying in psychiatry’s ruling document, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM—lying’s now listed as part of other disorders. Building on the Santos story, these clinicians are filing paperwork to get it included.
Lying would then get a DSM disease code; the lies would be symptoms. There would be, CNN points out, funding for research. Medication could come into play; insurers would reimburse treatment.
Lying would take its place in a document that started life with about 200 diagnoses and now has about three times that number, including “Caffeine-Induced Sleep Disorder.”
The National Enquirer also went to professionals for a George Santos opinion. Their take was a little more grabby: he is, says the cover story, an “American psycho.” A little less nuance, but the same basic idea.
The Santos Epic
Santos has enough sense of reality to gauge an audience. He gives us tragedy, with his Holocaust grandparents, and 9/11 victim mother. Plus power and glam—working high finance with Goldman Sachs, producing the Broadway show, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.
What else could Santos stick in his list of accomplishments? Rescuing puppies and kittens? He claimed that too.
If we add to the DSM a trait like lying, the diagnosis will include some version of the word “disorder.” But what does it mean to be disordered? Santos responded to news of an ethics investigation with nights of selfies and karaoke. At last week’s State of the Union, he held court so brazenly he enraged Mitt Romney, a man whose blood pressure seems only raiseable by forklift.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders gave the rebuttal to that State of the Union. She did so by repeatedly connecting Biden and the left with mental illness. The woke left, she said, is “madness.” Biden is “doubling down on the crazy.” The choice is “a choice between normal and crazy.”
It is a strange insult that fits equally well with me, George Santos, Biden, and whatever the “woke left” is. “Crazy” is the low-hanging fruit of the insult world. Saying an idea is wrong takes reason. But “normal” is good. “Crazy” is bad. No argument is needed. It’s a brutal shortcut between complicated points.
The truth is that we have two social stories about mental differences. The first says there is no “crazy,” just a diagnosis that must be approached as a disease like any other. Psychosis is a symptom of my bipolar diagnosis, as high blood sugar is a symptom of diabetes. That, we say, is the correct story and the way to fight stigma.
In practice that’s not the story we believe. We believe “crazy” is a basket that holds disagreeable things, ones that make us uncomfortable or angry. Things we very much don’t like and hope others won’t, once we, like Huckabee Sanders, convince listeners “crazy” is the correct label.
Maybe George Santos himself feels disordered. In that case, if he wants help and someone can give it to him, I’m all for it. Problems arise with the idea that Santos has a disorder whether the diagnoser has spent five minutes with him or not and whether it bothers him or not.
Poor Kim Kardashian
Maybe Santos will get burned. He could lose his seat. But he’s reached a place of prestige unattainable without his lying. Maybe Santos will survive, or go the route so loved by the public, the apology-redemption story.
Or maybe he’ll just leave Congress and rake in speaking fees and appear on shows like The Masked Singer. Fame in America serves few people badly. Suggesting help may be the equivalent of saying, in 2007. Poor Kim Kardashian. So much potential, if only it weren’t for that sex tape.
To pretend to have a connection to September 11 and the Holocaust is morally repugnant. Claiming ownership of Spider-Man, a notorious flop, feels clueless in a way that’s almost charming. That these “symptoms” are not equivalent is the moral part of this story. Symptoms are things that exist to be wiped out once identified, not considered in the philosophical light we put on human choices.
Treatment of the Soul
I’ve said this before—the proliferation of DSM disease categories and prescribing of psychiatric meds in the 21st century has only correlated with a growth in mental struggle. I wonder how a clinician would judge when lying becomes a sickness, in the era of social media and the knowingly false nature of so much self-representation.
The term “psychiatry” was first used to mean treatment of the soul. Not, primarily, the symptom. The disease story isn't ending social stigma--it often adds to black-and-white thinking: crazy or normal, sick or well. Let's go deeper. What do Santos’ lies tell us about him? What do they tell us about those who accept them? What lies cross our own particular boundaries? These are not symptoms but human questions. Time to get our stories straight.
