> I’m not saying that all online bad behaviour is because of mental health issues or personality disorders: lots of people are just dickheads, and there’s no need to pathologise them.
One of the important lessons I took away from a milestone book on abuse, "Why Does He Do That?" is that people really want to excuse harmful behaviors as illness. When often, repeated bad behavior happens because it works for the person in question.
Once my boss's boss fired my boss and suddenly took over managing me. After my first meeting with him, where a nominal 30-minute chat turned into 90 minutes of berating, I walked out wondering what the hell happened. I grabbed my copy of "Why Does He Do That?" and quickly found him described as abuser subtype "Mr Right".
It was a huge relief just to be able to put the head-spinning experience in perspective. And it let me really prepare for the rest of my (short) tenure there.
Alcoholism is a mental illness and can have comorbidity with other mental issues. For many the answer to your "why am I holding this beer" is "I don't want to feel". But the alcoholic (not in any sort of recovery) never gets to the self reflection where they ask themselves why they have the beer.
Like many mental illnesses, the inability to have agency over certain thoughts or thought process is what make it an illness. Alcoholism and other addictions are not typically something people reason themselves into with compelling arguments and a cost-benefit analysis.
It's the same thing with intrusive thoughts - medication plus cognitive-behavioural therapy works best, that condition is something that you can reason yourself out of when you recognize the signs quickly enough.
This happens far less than you think. Alcoholics and other addicts will seek out or only socialize with enablers. They will also seek out codependent relationships. They'll do it subconsciously because they don't want pushback against their actions.
Realizing they have a problem isn't helpful for most alcoholics. Realizing they have a problem is just another thing driving them to drink. An alcoholic's family falling apart is often just the first in a series of shitty events on their descent to their rock bottom point.
One of the big differences between alcoholism and other mental illnesses is drinking is viewed as a "normal" behavior. Unless you're counting their drinks or actively tracking their visits to a bar most people aren't going to realize the alcoholic is drinking more and more often than they think.
I know several recovering alcoholics. When they were drinking simply knowing they had a problem was useless. That's like an asthmatic knowing they have asthma and someone just expecting them to breathe better. It just doesn't work that way.
It's section on mental illness says that abusers are too "selfish" to put up with a medications side-effects and that they overdose on medication to strike out at his partner dramatically. The guy isn't really an expert on mental illness at all, pushes the hypothesis that abusive behavior and mental illness are distinct things, and that abuse by and large is rational behavior. The book in general defines abuse so broadly that anybody could meet the criteria if they're blunt, sarcastic, career-oriented, or simply discontinue medication. The author denies rehabilitation is possible because he deemed almost all the men he met to still be abusers when he was done treating them.
I generally don't see this book as examining the link between mental illness and abuse in any sort of balanced way, it's more a tome to persuade women that they're in an abusive relationship and their partner only abuses them because they think they can get away with it and would stop otherwise.
I strongly disagree with your notion that the book defines abuse so broadly that anybody could meet the criteria. As I read it, the book doesn't apply to most people; I'd say it only matches a handful of people I've met in my life.
I think the rest of your characterizations are also basically incorrect and unfair, and in ways that I don't see it as worth my time to dispute in detail. If others aren't sure, I'd encourage them to read the book to find out.
You can interpret the book as to deeming virtually anybody you think as either meeting or not meeting the criteria similar to a horoscope. The star signs being "Mr. Right" or "Mr. Sensitive" and "Drill Sargent" etc etc.
I could very trivially make the case that the author very clearly meets his own "Mr. Right" stereotype and thus is an abuser. He considers himself an authority on mental illness and substance abuse with no relevant training, sees the world as a huge classroom, he twists others statements to make them sound absurd, he switches to his voice of truth and speaks definitively, he seems to enjoy straightening out people in front of others to the point of remarking on constant conversations where he outwitted various men, and he says bad things about men to other people.
In fact by disagreeing with me you're a little "Mr. Right". I'm also "Mr. Right". None of us can ever be rehabilitated and all of us just need to be escaped from. We're all doing this because we think we can get away with it.
I prefer Machiavelli's work because at least that framed the reader as being no better than anybody else. This is Machiavelli with a victim complex. My issue with the book isn't misunderstanding it's disgust at the black and white ethics.
The weirder part to me is the number of people who end up caping for abusers and abuse. Usually they're more subtle than you, though.
And that's not even getting into political and culture fears like male-to-female transgender people "trapping" men into having sex with them, or using the "wrong" bathrooms, or the extreme right-wing fears of a "gay agenda" to undermine traditional Christian-oriented culture, or "feminizing chemicals" being added to the water (the whole "gay frogs" thing) to increase the homosexual population and emasculate male aggression and military readiness. People even argue that homosexuality presents a threat to human evolution itself, despite being present in many known (and not extinct) animal species and likely humanity's own evolutionary ancestors as well as humanity itself.
Actually that part is kinda true. A fair bit of the effluent from paper mills, say, are estrogen analogs.
It's used for things (like hydrophobic molecules) that avoid other things (in this case water) as if they fear them.
Unless we're doing one of those "literally literally means figuratively" things here in which case... meh?
Just to be crystal clear here, I'm not saying we don't have groups who are anti-X for whatever value of X. I'm saying that recasting (and often miscasting) that antipathy as (maybe masked) fear is counterproductive.
> Specific phobia is an anxiety disorder, characterized by an extreme, unreasonable, and irrational fear associated with a specific object or situation.[1][2] Specific phobia can lead to avoidance of the object or situation, persistence of the fear, and significant distress or problems functioning associated with the fear. A phobia can be the fear of anything.
Whatever the term originally meant to the greeks, it does seem to be knit with the concept of fear today.
Homophobia is just a nice spin though. For the most part I couldn't care less about who people are dating or boning.
(Hydrophobia is another name for rabies. Rabies often induces a fear of water.)
It wasn't that long ago that they were claiming that gay marriage and acceptance would cause society to collapse, and believing that God would punish everyone for it. I had a neighbor who claimed that hurricane devastation is God's doing because gay marriage was legalized.