I know some folks don’t want to hear this, but it needs to be said. People in the QAnon conspiracy movement are, by and large, mentally ill. I say this not to mock or ridicule them. I say it because it’s almost incontestably true. And our unwillingness to say so is a danger to this society and its future.
And yet, some insist we should never call anyone mentally or emotionally unwell, especially if we are not — as I am not — a mental health professional. To do so, they argue, stigmatizes mental illness and contributes to fear and mistreatment of those suffering from various disorders. But both of these lines of reasoning seem terribly misguided to me.
As for diagnosing people without the necessary credentials, note, I am not suggesting I know which disorders afflict persons in the QAnon movement. I wouldn’t diagnose someone on the street holding their stomach tightly while vomiting blood, either. That said, were I to come across such a person, it wouldn’t require having gone to medical school to know they needed to see a doctor, and quickly.
So far as stigma is concerned, dancing around the issue of mental illness only further mystifies it, making it seem distant, rare, and dangerously unmentionable. This silence is what then maintains stigma (and shame) around such conditions and can lead to any number of destructive social outcomes.
And when it comes to the QAnon diehards, we can afford to dance no longer. Because, and I hope this won’t come as a shock…
If you think JFK Jr. is still alive and will soon reclaim the White House with Donald Trump, then destroy a Democrat-led Satanic global pedophile ring that harvests adrenochrome from babies before consuming them, you are not well. If you believe any one of these things, let alone two or more, let alone all of them, you need help. And by help, I don’t mean Snopes. I mean medication.
If you believe the COVID vaccine contains a microchip that allows the “Deep State” to read your thoughts and track your whereabouts — or that the vaccine makes metal objects stick to you, or is intended to depopulate the world on the orders of Bill Gates — you are mentally ill.
Not just wrong.
Not just sucked down the rabbit hole of online conspiracism.
And not just brainwashed by OANN or Newsmax or Tucker or some New Age woo-woo on Reddit.
This isn’t about being gullible and not good at Google. It’s about seeing complicated patterns in misspelled and mispronounced words. It’s about finding hidden meaning in utterly banal phrases from the e-mails of John Podesta.
If we are to address the crisis of mental illness in this country and get to a place where we guarantee comprehensive, affordable mental health services for all, we’ll need to acknowledge how common mental illness is. And we have proof staring us right in the face with the QAnon phenomenon as a starting place for that acknowledgment.
If families had to grapple with the fact that they have mentally ill relatives, or if folks had to recognize the mental illness of a friend, for instance, it would potentially change their beliefs about health care policy and the importance of affordable, accessible care. By avoiding pointing out population-level mental health issues so as not to stigmatize the ill, we allow families to satisfy themselves with one-on-one strategies for de-programming their loved ones who they think are just going through some politically induced phase. That approach won’t work and leaves the larger crisis unattended.
And if the Republican Party had to grapple with the fact that at least a third and possibly more than half of their voters believe things that make them, almost by definition, mentally ill, it might produce change. Although many will be loath to undertake such an autopsy, the long-term future of respectable conservatism likely depends on it. How is it that an otherwise legitimate political party, with a long and mainstream tradition, could become a haven for people who cannot discern reality from fantasy? What did the party do to attract such people to its ranks in such large numbers? These are the questions that need asking and for which we need answers.
It’s not that there aren’t plenty of mentally ill people on the political left too. There are. But the kind of delusions that are now ubiquitous among large percentages of the population seem to cluster heavily on the right. And if I were a conservative of relatively sober moorings, I would want to get to the bottom of why that is, and quickly.
My own theory is twofold: first, the kind of mental illnesses that cause people to believe in evil forces who are out to get them — which is a particular kind of delusional ideation — are the kind whose sufferers would be inclined to cast their lot with modern conservatism.
The right has long stoked conspiracism and projected a vision of society as a battle between good and evil. Whether evangelical Christianity’s dichotomous interpretation of the blessed and the damned or the anti-Communist paranoia of the 1940s and ’50s (represented best by McCarthyism and the John Birch Society), the right has long appealed to those given to seeing human existence as a Manichean struggle between the forces of darkness and light. In short, people inclined to purely delusional beliefs are more likely to be conservatives.
Second, and on the flip side, the kind of people attracted to conservatism are dispositionally ill-equipped to deal with some of the modern developments in America. This leaves them particularly vulnerable to mental and emotional breakdowns.
America is a nation that tells everyone they can succeed and accomplish their dreams if they work hard — a rugged individualist mentality that holds special appeal for people whose politics lean to the right. The problem is, as the economy globalizes and society changes — leaving conservative-heavy rural areas and small towns behind, stagnant and stuck in a bygone era — those in such spaces find it increasingly difficult to cope.
So too, white Americans, who have always had the privilege of buying the national myth (and believing it was real), are particularly unprepared for having to confront a rapidly changing society. Black and brown folks, on the other hand, have always known things were more complicated. So even though they will suffer any number of organic mental illnesses, too, theirs will not be as likely to have emerged from this particular sociopolitical context. Nor will they likely have intensified in recent years in response to social, cultural, or economic changes confronting them with the emptiness of the nation’s promises.
People of color have always had to manage the contradictions of American society from the start, unlike most whites — and especially conservative-leaning ones — who have typically refused even to see those contradictions. Once promised the moon, as white Americans have been, those who feel in some way inadequate cast about for dragons to slay, for monsters to blame, for scapegoats to sacrifice. And at some point, that process untethers one from reality. It has done so here.
And if we can’t label it what it is, out of some misplaced concern about stigma, the dangers posed by those who are increasingly disconnected from the real world will only grow. America faces a mental health emergency — a public health crisis — every bit as dangerous to our long-term security and stability as COVID. Indeed, given the authoritarian, quasi-fascist tendencies that feature so prominently in the QAnon-right, the threat posed by the nation’s mental and emotional unraveling is likely far more significant than any we have faced before.
We owe it to the country, and frankly even to those who are ill, to be honest, no matter how difficult it may be to hear the truth.
