A Better Way to Disagree

Honestly with Bari Weiss

The Free Press

News, Society & Culture

4.6 • 7.8K Ratings

🗓️ 23 November 2022

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A few months ago, I had writer Freddie deBoer on the podcast for an episode we called, “Does Glorifying Sickness Deter Healing?” We talked about his experience living with severe bipolar disorder and the dangerous ways in which mental illness has gotten wrapped up in our growing cultural obsession with identity politics. It’s almost like sickness, he argued, has become chic. We spent some of the conversation talking critically about a New York Times article by writer Daniel Bergner about a movement away from medication and more towards acceptance. A movement that replaces words like “psychosis” with “nonconsensus realities.” This article, in Freddie’s view, was exemplary of the very phenomenon he was calling out. A lot of people responded extremely positively to my conversation with Freddie. Others, not so much. One of those people was Daniel Bergner. So I invited him on the show. Today’s episode is not just a debate about how society should handle the epidemic of mental illness. It’s a model for how to disagree with someone productively, respectively, honestly. It’s a reminder not only that it’s okay to come out of a conversation strongly disagreeing with someone, but that it’s of vital importance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Cheese It has arrived. A cheesy new snack that's packed full of intense cheesy flavor.
0:09.0	Get your hands on a pack in stores now.
0:15.0	Fancy a cheese hit!
0:18.0	I'm Barry Weiss and this is honestly.
0:25.0	Over the summer I had a writer that I really admired
0:28.0	named Freddie de Boer on the podcast
0:31.0	to talk not so much about his writing but about mental illness.
0:34.0	Like a lot of people with my poor disorder I become extremely grandiose when I'm manic,
0:40.0	even more grandiose than I am normally.
0:43.6	We talked a lot about his personal struggle
0:45.7	with bipolar disorder.
0:47.2	My manic periods are dominated by paranoia
0:49.4	and by fear that people are conspiring against me.
0:54.0	This very often will manifest itself in my completely baseless decisions
1:00.0	that people who have been close to me have for whatever imagined reason they've lost loyalty to me
1:06.2	they've turned against me they're no longer tight with me I will make theatrical demands of their attention and of their support.
1:18.0	Eventually I become so aggressive I push them away and pushing them.
1:22.0	And we also talked about how mental illness has gotten strangely wrapped up in our growing
1:27.6	cultural obsession with identity politics.
1:30.8	There is an absolute desperate hunger among seemingly all kinds of people to have specific and discreet elements of a personality that they can display online so that people see them as cool
1:45.8	and interesting and someone they want to be friends with. That mental illness
1:50.2	has become not something to manage, but a kind of precious thing that needs to be
	...

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