Darian Leader

“Neurotic people often feel as if they are fakes, playing the social game while inwardly despising it, and have a sense of illegitimacy as if they lacked a place in the world. This sense of having a double life creates conflict, yet in as-if cases, there is never a struggle between the "real me" and the social self, as one might expect. It is an identification without conflict. Sometimes, their stiffness and superficiality in social relations may be noticed by other people, and it can give the picture of the commitment-phobe. In fact, the person just knows at some level to stay away from situations that would involve an appeal to the symbolic, those, precisely, where a commitment is involved.”
― Darian Leader, What Is Madness?

“Campaign to destigmatize so-called "mental illness" often take a wrong turning here. They try to demonstrate how suffers of some condition have made amazing contributions to the science or the arts. Trying to destigmatize the diagnosis of autism, for example, we read how Einstein and Newton would have received that diagnosis today, and yet made fabulous discoveries in the field of physics. Even if they are acknowledged to have been "different", their worth is still reckoned in terms of how their work has impacted on the world of others. However well-intentioned, such perspectives are hardly judicious, as they make an implicit equation between value and social utility. Taking this step is dangerous, as the moment that human life is defined in terms of utility, the door to stigmatization and segregation is opened. If someone was found to be not useful, what value, then, would their life have? This was in fact exactly the argument of the early-twentieth-century eugenicists who complained for the extermination of the mentally ill. Although no one would admit such aspirations today, we cannot ignore the resurfacing in recent years of a remarkably similar discourse, with its emphasis on social utility, hereditary and genetic vulnerability.”
― Darian Leader, What Is Madness?