Episode Details

My guest on the show today is Emmett Rensin, the author of 2024’s The Complications: On Going Insane in America, a really good collection of essays about various aspects of mental illness, how we construct and treat it as a society, and Emmett’s own fairly terrifying history of dealing with it.

I asked Emmett to come on to the show after reading his recent essay in The Lamp Magazine, “Over the Borderline,” which is a profile of the soft anti-psychiatry activist and writer Laura Delano, whose memoir of extricating herself from what she sees as the baleful clutches of the mental health and psychiatric establishment has been a bit of a phenomenon.

It’s a really extraordinary piece, which you should all go read.

It’s about Delano’s story. It’s about the interesting ways in which she’s gentrifying anti-psychiatry for a new audience. It’s about Emmett’s own wrestling with mental illness, diagnosis, and psychopharmaceuticals. And it’s about how to contend with the fact that our psychiatric regime is both terribly inadequate to the challenge of all the mentally ill or struggling people it has to deal with—uncertain in its science, shameful in its legacy, destined to fail and in some cases do real damage to a fair number of people—and also, in the end, probably the least bad option we have on the table, run by a lot of people with good intentions, a lot of compassion, and a genuine desire to do the best they can with the tools we have for people who are suffering.

I didn’t really know much about Emmett before reading this essay, but it’s one of those pieces where you read it and immediately know you’re dealing with a rare intellect and a talent. It’s that good. He’s on my list now of writers I have to keep track of.

In addition to the show, one brief aside.

Back in 2015, I attended a conference for communications and marketing people that was held on Coronoado Island in San Diego. The keynote speaker was Ezra Klein, who at the time was riding pretty high as the young philosopher king of Vox, which he and Matt Yglesias had founded just the year before.

My memory of his talk, which may also just have been a conversation with one of the conference organizers, is pretty vague. But I have a very distinct memory of one thing he said to us, which was that one of the most fascinating things they’d learned from analyzing the metrics for the Vox site was that content about race and gender was massively more effective at driving traffic than almost any other topic.

I don’t know if he said it approvingly, like it was evidence that people really did care about these important issues, and that it put the lie to the old status quo assumption that social justice content was boring to readers. He may have said it neutrally, like isn’t this interesting. Or maybe he said it with some alarm, like it was a combustible substance that had to be handled with extreme care.

But the fact of it has stayed with me ever since, and I genuinely think it may have helped me in keeping some balance during the period of craziness that was about to ensue. I had this awareness that that kind of culture war content just drove people nuts, shot a bolt of electricity straight to the sub-rational regions of their brains, and was therefore suspicious of the consensus narratives that formed during that time.

I was reminded me of Klein’s observations, recently, when I wrote a

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