Excellent piece. You focus on schizophrenia as an example but it has me thinking about more popular diagnoses in the modern culture—adhd, depression, anxiety, autism, etc.
Many of these seem to me to be partially political—taking somewhat normal reactions to a broken modern society, or at least a normal reaction for a sizable chunk of people—and reframing it as a personal neuro-emotional problem.
The interesting aspect about how this manifests in modern society is that the people themselves play a huge role in perpetuating it. This likely happened in many other contexts, probably including china, but it differs from the more authority-enforced way it occurred in the 60s black rights movement.
Excellent point. School administrators get kickbacks for putting the kids on drugs. Talk about depraved.
Then we have all these so-called physicians and psychiatrists giving a bunch of adults the ADHD diagnosis and handing them drugs as well. Does anyone really think that those are legitimate diagnoses? Because it seems blatantly obvious that the goal is to squeeze the last drops out of a completely burned out generation of employees..
Then these employees are not only discarded in the end, but they are discarded with serious addictions and destroyed families and ruined lives.
The rulership absolutely loves it. And both parties are equally in service to the ruling bloodlines.
There is absolutely no way to win this while still identifying with either side in the two-party system.
100%. It’s happening to me right now—I need adhd meds to do a stupid job I dont even want to do. Im not convinced I have ADHD or if ADHD is a real thing, and if it is real, I’m certainly not convinced it’s a disorder. The problem is the system that pathologizes these normal variances in human neurology and behavior and expects inhuman levels of productivity and conformity, not the individual.
The craziest thing is running people who completely fall for it. I know someone who has legitimately convinced herself she has the latest disorder, for the past 5 popular disorders. At least most people, even if they’re caught up in it, are a bit skeptical after they phase through 2-3 disorders.
I think the biggest problem is the perception of the word disorder. We need people to be less afraid of "disorder" in all its forms, because chaos doesn't necessarily mean bad. Chaos and chaotic art can be very cathartic and is a very good representation of our overstimulated world
I had the thought a little while ago that the design of the major social media platforms not only encourage schizophrenic symptoms in individual users, particularly through features like algorithms showing one more content like that which they have already seen or engaged with, but through the very shape of the platforms being that which resembles the neurobiology of the schizophrenic brainstate.
In the neurochemical model, at least, schizophrenia is characterized by an excess of dopamine that exists because the brain fails to eliminate it after its normal deployments in neuron signaling. Normally, the brain uses dopamine for reinforcing a stimulus, and once that's over with the dopamine goes away. But in the schizophrenic condition, this dopamine hangs around for far longer, having a likewise effect of constantly reinforcing stimuli beyond their original sensory inputs, hence the common symptoms of hallucinations and apophenia.
And on something like Facebook or Youtube, content is always fed endlessly, without clear ends to bookend experiences (also why one can waste hours there and remember nothing), and is homogenous to what one already engages with, reinforcing its own themes, worldviews, etc. On the social level, groups and social circles similarly curdle together to feed reinforcing stimuli into themselves, something beyond just the infamous 20th century cults. QAnon and the Zizians could not exist at the formalistic level without the internet.
Questionable too, then, is the recent widespread popularity of "validation", "knowing your truth", and "doing your research". Sometimes we are, really, just wrong. Sometimes we *are* not valid, deluding ourselves, and bad at reading. But to tell someone they are wrong on the internet is tantamount to insult and instigation. This is very convenient for endless content models that harvest valuable user data and ad revenue from masses of people engaging more and more intensely and for longer and longer periods with that which reaffirms their identities and worldviews.
This is brilliant and a much needed analysis at this point. Brings to mind memory holes and newspeak from 1984…we really are getting there.
It’s an insidious kind of wet encryption that just nullifies any prospect of reasonable skeptical dialogue on a range of topics. Most people are afraid of being labelled mad so keep in their safety box, keep the blinders on, rather than do anything to save themselves/question the covert oppressive forces fast becoming an overtly present fascistic tech-necrosis
Yes, your comment and this piece have got me thinking more and more of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita and how in it he portrays the weaponization of psychiatry to silence and imprison artists in Soviet Russia.
I like the sort of vibe of this. But I feel compelled (perhaps by some pathology :p) to point out that recent research into schizophrenia sort of proposes that the mechanism is less *thinking* too much as it is perceiving too much. That there’s a reduced capacity to filter stimuli to the point that a sense of familiarity breaks down even in familiar contexts. This unfamiliarity then leads to confusion, disorientation, novel language patterns, attempts to systemise the experience (seen as delusions) and panic.
How amazing and refreshing to read something deep and enligntening. The authoritarian tactics of accusing someone of being mentally unstable happens a lot in toxic friendships and relationships. its a sign well worth taking notice if you are decluttering your connections, intimate, social and all kinds. it happened to me not too long ago with a very long term friend, that actually has a very domineering nature. There are people that you may consider a friend, because they got you out of trouble numerous times and in turn you helped too. but being recently accused of being mentally unstable by such a person when i said a few home truths that were long overdue , after expressing my difference of opinion on something trivial, only indicates that this person is not really a friend of mine, only an ally in the greedy and corrupt human world we live in. Im sure everyone reading this can relate with experiences of their own. We may know many people, but very few will be able to help promptly and be willing to do so. Most who do expect favours in return. They are not friends, they are allies that can quickly become enemies. Then there are the very select few, maybe one or two who really are genuine friends to you and will tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear always, because they have your best interest and wellbeing at heart. Those rare gems respect your boundaries and will always be there for you without expecting favours in return. If you have a person like this in your life, be sure to cherish that person dearly.
Ohhh this is a good one. This is far less academically sophisticated than the examples you cite, but I can’t help being reminded of how words like “crazy” and “insane” have had a massive uptick in use in trendy cultural lexicon among young people especially in the last two years or so. It seems too on the nose to be totally a coincidence.
Response: The Gaze of Psychiatry and the Archive of Excess Thought
This is one of those rare essays that, even where I diverge, still feels worth entering. Thank you for not just gesturing at the surface of psychiatric power but for pressing into the historical strata — Soviet sluggish schizophrenia, the DSM-II, Ionia State Hospital — the places where language mutates into surveillance.
But here’s where I want to offer a gentle détournement.
You suggest that psychiatry has been weaponized against thought itself, especially thought that deviates from dominant narrative orders — that those who “think too much” (or too divergently) risk diagnosis, marginalization, pharmaceutical containment. I agree. But I want to be precise about the structure of that process — and how it operates libidinally, not just ideologically.
What’s missing from most American conversations about psychiatry is not just a historical awareness of its role as a disciplinary apparatus (Foucault gave us that scaffolding), but a psychoanalytic recognition that all subjectivity is already structured by lack — and that psychiatry doesn’t invent the wound; it names, masks, or redirects it.
You gesture toward xiang tai duo (thinking too much) as both compassionate and disciplinary. Yes — because thought in excess is only “too much” when it threatens the prevailing symbolic order. But also: thought in excess is the condition of being a subject. The real question isn’t whether psychiatry disciplines deviance — it clearly does. The deeper question is this:
Who gets to decide where the line between insight and psychosis is drawn — and why do we keep pretending it’s an objective measure?
The tragic irony is that psychiatry could be a space for encounter — a liminal zone where breakdown becomes breakthrough. But too often, it becomes what Fonteur (yes, I’m bringing him in) might call a bureaucratization of rupture. The moan is pathologized. The scream is labeled. The glyph of unprocessed reality is flattened into diagnostic code.
You make a compelling point about the “schizo spectrum” as a frame that expands what counts as abnormal — and here I think you’re almost touching Deleuze and Guattari’s insight: that schizophrenia isn’t a disease so much as a mode of desiring-production, one that capitalism both exploits and suppresses. But they don’t romanticize it. They warn us that the deterritorialized flows of the schizo are sublime and horrifying — because they dissolve the coordinates of stable meaning.
In other words: yes, there is paranoia. Yes, there is excessive thought. But what we call “illness” is often just an overflow of the Real — too much truth, too raw, arriving in a system that cannot metabolize it.
The mistake isn’t in noticing how psychiatry disciplines. The mistake is in assuming there’s ever been a version of thought not haunted by power, gaze, or fantasy.
What remains is this: we need spaces — intellectual, clinical, political — where thought in excess doesn’t equal pathology. Where paranoia is metabolized, not punished. Where schizo-affective rupture is seen not as failure, but as an interface with the unbearable.
As you put it so well: if psychiatry is a mirror to society, then our concept of sanity is less about truth than it is about obedience.
I would only add:
Truth, too, is always partial.
And sometimes the delusion is the only language we have left for the thing we can’t yet say.
Stay curious, indeed. But also — stay uncontainable.
Very compelling, thank you. What came to mind is the extent to which stigmatisation management on part of the declared diseased becomes their actual response-ability (their ability to respond due to urgency if the primary goal is to be ‘normal’ as they are feared into conforming to status quo rather than being true to their experience). Rather than give them the autonomy and agency to be responsible and moral agents in absence of being labelled or diagnosed. Whereas the primary ‘disease’ may indeed be a kind of hyper awareness or sensitivity which need not be pathological; secondarily they develop anxiety and worry about how their experience of the world pushes them to nonconformity. I read recently that obsessive thinking capitalises on the embarrassing or stigmatised nature of certain thoughts/behavior and thus enforces the obsessed’s imbalanced thinking. Resulting in a disrupted sense of self. If we see thinking too much as a necessary cognitive faculty in overdrive it is even more understandable that the affected people do not become fearful of their thinking ability altogether, and question themselves (following others) their ability to think critically and for themselves.
Very interesting, but evidently you read a strange imbalance when it comes to left and right. The strange right-wing self-referential memes still become something to be outraged about, and not the normal response to a system of control.
I was in the middle of writing a comment talking about my own experiences of schizophrenia and it’s clear foreboding in the ways I couldn’t fathom the world views set by my family (indoctrinated by the state and perpetuated through their conformity and rule) when I clicked off accidentally and it disappeared. The argument you pose here has deep grounds in universal truth. We are as we are when we’re born until we’re taught it’s not enough and if you’re not willing then you’ll be jailed, killed, punished, or forced into submission. You name it. My life’s peace is that those who perpetuate these ideas will die like I will. No more shiny money, houses, power. It’s all ape-like and hilarious and entirely the M.O of such a creature. Evolution isn’t technology but the escape of the limitations others have placed on themselves and others for benefits that are NOT eternal haha. Anyways, great work on this man. I look forward to more from you!
Very thought-provoking and an interesting perspective! I'm someone who's actually had a psychosis and when you introduced the Chinese term 'xiang tai duo', I actually thought that it was quite a good description of what happened. In essence it really was just thinking too much (racing and intense thoughts). I did have my own strange logic behind my delusions in a way that even made sense to some other people and didn't sound too out of the ordinary by my careful phrasing. So I think the term emphasising thought over behaviour seems quite fitting- and I wouldn't say it puts the onus on me because the racing nature of those thoughts was not in my control. I guess that's where the distinction between psychotic and radical (or highly involved? I guess) thinking is- how in control are you of your thoughts and actions and are you consistent? After my psychosis, I kind of thought that all extreme thinking has its roots in a certain logic about reality, even if it's not always obvious what the connection made was, so I guess that's why it's easy to stick a label on anything anyone perceives as extreme as crazy and not worth engaging with because it's based in a foreign logic. I feel like what I'm saying is not very cohesive and is a bit just blurted out, but I hope it means something
Loved the essay! Im a student of psychology and your text reminded me of something i learned in my classes in social psychology: culturaly, we attempt to cure the symptoms, but rarely the disease. We May try to help when it comes to social problems but still, projects that go to the core of those issues are rare. Its easier to diagnose a person and have talks with their family than it is to diagnose a Society, even tho the Society we live in shows clean signs of it being ill.
Excellent piece. You focus on schizophrenia as an example but it has me thinking about more popular diagnoses in the modern culture—adhd, depression, anxiety, autism, etc.
Many of these seem to me to be partially political—taking somewhat normal reactions to a broken modern society, or at least a normal reaction for a sizable chunk of people—and reframing it as a personal neuro-emotional problem.
The interesting aspect about how this manifests in modern society is that the people themselves play a huge role in perpetuating it. This likely happened in many other contexts, probably including china, but it differs from the more authority-enforced way it occurred in the 60s black rights movement.
Much to think about.
Excellent point. School administrators get kickbacks for putting the kids on drugs. Talk about depraved.
Then we have all these so-called physicians and psychiatrists giving a bunch of adults the ADHD diagnosis and handing them drugs as well. Does anyone really think that those are legitimate diagnoses? Because it seems blatantly obvious that the goal is to squeeze the last drops out of a completely burned out generation of employees..
Then these employees are not only discarded in the end, but they are discarded with serious addictions and destroyed families and ruined lives.
The rulership absolutely loves it. And both parties are equally in service to the ruling bloodlines.
There is absolutely no way to win this while still identifying with either side in the two-party system.
100%. It’s happening to me right now—I need adhd meds to do a stupid job I dont even want to do. Im not convinced I have ADHD or if ADHD is a real thing, and if it is real, I’m certainly not convinced it’s a disorder. The problem is the system that pathologizes these normal variances in human neurology and behavior and expects inhuman levels of productivity and conformity, not the individual.
The craziest thing is running people who completely fall for it. I know someone who has legitimately convinced herself she has the latest disorder, for the past 5 popular disorders. At least most people, even if they’re caught up in it, are a bit skeptical after they phase through 2-3 disorders.
I think the biggest problem is the perception of the word disorder. We need people to be less afraid of "disorder" in all its forms, because chaos doesn't necessarily mean bad. Chaos and chaotic art can be very cathartic and is a very good representation of our overstimulated world
I had the thought a little while ago that the design of the major social media platforms not only encourage schizophrenic symptoms in individual users, particularly through features like algorithms showing one more content like that which they have already seen or engaged with, but through the very shape of the platforms being that which resembles the neurobiology of the schizophrenic brainstate.
In the neurochemical model, at least, schizophrenia is characterized by an excess of dopamine that exists because the brain fails to eliminate it after its normal deployments in neuron signaling. Normally, the brain uses dopamine for reinforcing a stimulus, and once that's over with the dopamine goes away. But in the schizophrenic condition, this dopamine hangs around for far longer, having a likewise effect of constantly reinforcing stimuli beyond their original sensory inputs, hence the common symptoms of hallucinations and apophenia.
And on something like Facebook or Youtube, content is always fed endlessly, without clear ends to bookend experiences (also why one can waste hours there and remember nothing), and is homogenous to what one already engages with, reinforcing its own themes, worldviews, etc. On the social level, groups and social circles similarly curdle together to feed reinforcing stimuli into themselves, something beyond just the infamous 20th century cults. QAnon and the Zizians could not exist at the formalistic level without the internet.
agreed! i appreciate the comment. you make some very good points
Questionable too, then, is the recent widespread popularity of "validation", "knowing your truth", and "doing your research". Sometimes we are, really, just wrong. Sometimes we *are* not valid, deluding ourselves, and bad at reading. But to tell someone they are wrong on the internet is tantamount to insult and instigation. This is very convenient for endless content models that harvest valuable user data and ad revenue from masses of people engaging more and more intensely and for longer and longer periods with that which reaffirms their identities and worldviews.
This is brilliant and a much needed analysis at this point. Brings to mind memory holes and newspeak from 1984…we really are getting there.
It’s an insidious kind of wet encryption that just nullifies any prospect of reasonable skeptical dialogue on a range of topics. Most people are afraid of being labelled mad so keep in their safety box, keep the blinders on, rather than do anything to save themselves/question the covert oppressive forces fast becoming an overtly present fascistic tech-necrosis
Yes, your comment and this piece have got me thinking more and more of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita and how in it he portrays the weaponization of psychiatry to silence and imprison artists in Soviet Russia.
exactly, well said!
I like the sort of vibe of this. But I feel compelled (perhaps by some pathology :p) to point out that recent research into schizophrenia sort of proposes that the mechanism is less *thinking* too much as it is perceiving too much. That there’s a reduced capacity to filter stimuli to the point that a sense of familiarity breaks down even in familiar contexts. This unfamiliarity then leads to confusion, disorientation, novel language patterns, attempts to systemise the experience (seen as delusions) and panic.
This was one hell of an analysis. Well put friend!
i appreciate the comment. i’m glad you found the episode rightful. expansion on the post coming soon!
How amazing and refreshing to read something deep and enligntening. The authoritarian tactics of accusing someone of being mentally unstable happens a lot in toxic friendships and relationships. its a sign well worth taking notice if you are decluttering your connections, intimate, social and all kinds. it happened to me not too long ago with a very long term friend, that actually has a very domineering nature. There are people that you may consider a friend, because they got you out of trouble numerous times and in turn you helped too. but being recently accused of being mentally unstable by such a person when i said a few home truths that were long overdue , after expressing my difference of opinion on something trivial, only indicates that this person is not really a friend of mine, only an ally in the greedy and corrupt human world we live in. Im sure everyone reading this can relate with experiences of their own. We may know many people, but very few will be able to help promptly and be willing to do so. Most who do expect favours in return. They are not friends, they are allies that can quickly become enemies. Then there are the very select few, maybe one or two who really are genuine friends to you and will tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear always, because they have your best interest and wellbeing at heart. Those rare gems respect your boundaries and will always be there for you without expecting favours in return. If you have a person like this in your life, be sure to cherish that person dearly.
well thought out comment! i’m glad you found the post insightful
Ohhh this is a good one. This is far less academically sophisticated than the examples you cite, but I can’t help being reminded of how words like “crazy” and “insane” have had a massive uptick in use in trendy cultural lexicon among young people especially in the last two years or so. It seems too on the nose to be totally a coincidence.
SCREAMS AND JUMPS UP AND DOWN IN APPLAUSE AND ADMIRATION!!!!
appreciated! i’m glad you found the essay insightful
Response: The Gaze of Psychiatry and the Archive of Excess Thought
This is one of those rare essays that, even where I diverge, still feels worth entering. Thank you for not just gesturing at the surface of psychiatric power but for pressing into the historical strata — Soviet sluggish schizophrenia, the DSM-II, Ionia State Hospital — the places where language mutates into surveillance.
But here’s where I want to offer a gentle détournement.
You suggest that psychiatry has been weaponized against thought itself, especially thought that deviates from dominant narrative orders — that those who “think too much” (or too divergently) risk diagnosis, marginalization, pharmaceutical containment. I agree. But I want to be precise about the structure of that process — and how it operates libidinally, not just ideologically.
What’s missing from most American conversations about psychiatry is not just a historical awareness of its role as a disciplinary apparatus (Foucault gave us that scaffolding), but a psychoanalytic recognition that all subjectivity is already structured by lack — and that psychiatry doesn’t invent the wound; it names, masks, or redirects it.
You gesture toward xiang tai duo (thinking too much) as both compassionate and disciplinary. Yes — because thought in excess is only “too much” when it threatens the prevailing symbolic order. But also: thought in excess is the condition of being a subject. The real question isn’t whether psychiatry disciplines deviance — it clearly does. The deeper question is this:
Who gets to decide where the line between insight and psychosis is drawn — and why do we keep pretending it’s an objective measure?
The tragic irony is that psychiatry could be a space for encounter — a liminal zone where breakdown becomes breakthrough. But too often, it becomes what Fonteur (yes, I’m bringing him in) might call a bureaucratization of rupture. The moan is pathologized. The scream is labeled. The glyph of unprocessed reality is flattened into diagnostic code.
You make a compelling point about the “schizo spectrum” as a frame that expands what counts as abnormal — and here I think you’re almost touching Deleuze and Guattari’s insight: that schizophrenia isn’t a disease so much as a mode of desiring-production, one that capitalism both exploits and suppresses. But they don’t romanticize it. They warn us that the deterritorialized flows of the schizo are sublime and horrifying — because they dissolve the coordinates of stable meaning.
In other words: yes, there is paranoia. Yes, there is excessive thought. But what we call “illness” is often just an overflow of the Real — too much truth, too raw, arriving in a system that cannot metabolize it.
The mistake isn’t in noticing how psychiatry disciplines. The mistake is in assuming there’s ever been a version of thought not haunted by power, gaze, or fantasy.
What remains is this: we need spaces — intellectual, clinical, political — where thought in excess doesn’t equal pathology. Where paranoia is metabolized, not punished. Where schizo-affective rupture is seen not as failure, but as an interface with the unbearable.
As you put it so well: if psychiatry is a mirror to society, then our concept of sanity is less about truth than it is about obedience.
I would only add:
Truth, too, is always partial.
And sometimes the delusion is the only language we have left for the thing we can’t yet say.
Stay curious, indeed. But also — stay uncontainable.
Very compelling, thank you. What came to mind is the extent to which stigmatisation management on part of the declared diseased becomes their actual response-ability (their ability to respond due to urgency if the primary goal is to be ‘normal’ as they are feared into conforming to status quo rather than being true to their experience). Rather than give them the autonomy and agency to be responsible and moral agents in absence of being labelled or diagnosed. Whereas the primary ‘disease’ may indeed be a kind of hyper awareness or sensitivity which need not be pathological; secondarily they develop anxiety and worry about how their experience of the world pushes them to nonconformity. I read recently that obsessive thinking capitalises on the embarrassing or stigmatised nature of certain thoughts/behavior and thus enforces the obsessed’s imbalanced thinking. Resulting in a disrupted sense of self. If we see thinking too much as a necessary cognitive faculty in overdrive it is even more understandable that the affected people do not become fearful of their thinking ability altogether, and question themselves (following others) their ability to think critically and for themselves.
Amazing
Very interesting, but evidently you read a strange imbalance when it comes to left and right. The strange right-wing self-referential memes still become something to be outraged about, and not the normal response to a system of control.
End has the questions to ask to start looking.
I was in the middle of writing a comment talking about my own experiences of schizophrenia and it’s clear foreboding in the ways I couldn’t fathom the world views set by my family (indoctrinated by the state and perpetuated through their conformity and rule) when I clicked off accidentally and it disappeared. The argument you pose here has deep grounds in universal truth. We are as we are when we’re born until we’re taught it’s not enough and if you’re not willing then you’ll be jailed, killed, punished, or forced into submission. You name it. My life’s peace is that those who perpetuate these ideas will die like I will. No more shiny money, houses, power. It’s all ape-like and hilarious and entirely the M.O of such a creature. Evolution isn’t technology but the escape of the limitations others have placed on themselves and others for benefits that are NOT eternal haha. Anyways, great work on this man. I look forward to more from you!
Very thought-provoking and an interesting perspective! I'm someone who's actually had a psychosis and when you introduced the Chinese term 'xiang tai duo', I actually thought that it was quite a good description of what happened. In essence it really was just thinking too much (racing and intense thoughts). I did have my own strange logic behind my delusions in a way that even made sense to some other people and didn't sound too out of the ordinary by my careful phrasing. So I think the term emphasising thought over behaviour seems quite fitting- and I wouldn't say it puts the onus on me because the racing nature of those thoughts was not in my control. I guess that's where the distinction between psychotic and radical (or highly involved? I guess) thinking is- how in control are you of your thoughts and actions and are you consistent? After my psychosis, I kind of thought that all extreme thinking has its roots in a certain logic about reality, even if it's not always obvious what the connection made was, so I guess that's why it's easy to stick a label on anything anyone perceives as extreme as crazy and not worth engaging with because it's based in a foreign logic. I feel like what I'm saying is not very cohesive and is a bit just blurted out, but I hope it means something
This was longer than intended- sorry for the lack of paragraphing!
Loved the essay! Im a student of psychology and your text reminded me of something i learned in my classes in social psychology: culturaly, we attempt to cure the symptoms, but rarely the disease. We May try to help when it comes to social problems but still, projects that go to the core of those issues are rare. Its easier to diagnose a person and have talks with their family than it is to diagnose a Society, even tho the Society we live in shows clean signs of it being ill.