This post seems to strongly hint at endorsing some very strong, implausible claims that arenât particularly necessary to its central point that various EA ways of thinking can make people sad and anxious*. First, footnote 18 seems to suggests that really people should give absolute priority to their own mental health over any ethical considerations whatsoever:
âIt seems to me that any healthy model would place mental wellbeing at the absolute foundation, with ethics as an optional choice, though I could potentially see a case for other models being promoted for strategic reasons.â
I think this is basically self-undermining. Presumably the reason we want people to generally think in ways that are mentally healthy is because we want to prevent harm to them (and others). But that very goal of preventing harm will sometimes point to prioritizing other things over getting people to think in the most mental health-conducive way**. (I personally, as a non-hedonist about well-being also think that sometimes having less healthy but more accurate beliefs can in itself make you overall better off than if you had less accurate beliefs and were less depressed/âanxious, even if the more accurate beliefs bring no practical benefits. But I think itâs totally reasonable to disagree with me about this.)
Secondly thereâs a suggestion that a healthy, balanced person thinks all perspectives are valid***. I donât really get what sense of âvalidityâ this could possibly be true on. If âvalidâ means âpersonal mental health promotingâ then youâve just spent a lot of time arguing, quite plausibly in my view, that a lot of EA perspectives damage mental health, which would make them less valid. This whole post is about arguing that some perspectives are less good and should be abandoned. Equally, not all perspectives are equally true, vaccines donât cause autism. Nor all they all equally moral: think of clichĂŠ examples like Hitler or a serial killer. Obviously, in therapy itself it might make sense for the therapist to ignore all this, and not provide judgments on your thoughts and feelings, but that doesnât mean everyone should always take that attitude in all contexts.
Iâll also say that I think the interaction of this topic with neurodiversity stuff is quite complicated. Much of the ways of thinking you are criticizing here feel to me, as an autistic person, to be distinctly autistic. (But donât just take my word for it! I am only one autistic person.) I think that makes plausible that encouraging them might harm autistic people in one way. But it also means that criticizing them can be stigmatizing. I have already spent a lot of emotional energy on the idea that there is something very wrong and bad and evil with how I process things, related to some of the themes of this post. In some ways, this might have been âhealthyâ in the sense of making me a better person, but it definitely didnât make me feel good about myself.
*I personally think that most EAs already think in roughly those ways before the encounter EA, but that is only a guess.
**If youâve seen The Sopranos, Tony arguably becomes mentally healthier by the end, but only because he has become more sociopathic and therefore feels less guilty. Fiction, yes, but definitely something that could plausibly happen to a real person.
***âMental wellbeing frameworks generally hold that all perspectives are valid, including things that EAâs ethical frameworks assert as bad/âwrong/âinvalidâ
This post seems to strongly hint at endorsing some very strong, implausible claims that arenât particularly necessary to its central point that various EA ways of thinking can make people sad and anxious*. First, footnote 18 seems to suggests that really people should give absolute priority to their own mental health over any ethical considerations whatsoever:
âIt seems to me that any healthy model would place mental wellbeing at the absolute foundation, with ethics as an optional choice, though I could potentially see a case for other models being promoted for strategic reasons.â
I think this is basically self-undermining. Presumably the reason we want people to generally think in ways that are mentally healthy is because we want to prevent harm to them (and others). But that very goal of preventing harm will sometimes point to prioritizing other things over getting people to think in the most mental health-conducive way**. (I personally, as a non-hedonist about well-being also think that sometimes having less healthy but more accurate beliefs can in itself make you overall better off than if you had less accurate beliefs and were less depressed/âanxious, even if the more accurate beliefs bring no practical benefits. But I think itâs totally reasonable to disagree with me about this.)
Secondly thereâs a suggestion that a healthy, balanced person thinks all perspectives are valid***. I donât really get what sense of âvalidityâ this could possibly be true on. If âvalidâ means âpersonal mental health promotingâ then youâve just spent a lot of time arguing, quite plausibly in my view, that a lot of EA perspectives damage mental health, which would make them less valid. This whole post is about arguing that some perspectives are less good and should be abandoned. Equally, not all perspectives are equally true, vaccines donât cause autism. Nor all they all equally moral: think of clichĂŠ examples like Hitler or a serial killer. Obviously, in therapy itself it might make sense for the therapist to ignore all this, and not provide judgments on your thoughts and feelings, but that doesnât mean everyone should always take that attitude in all contexts.
Iâll also say that I think the interaction of this topic with neurodiversity stuff is quite complicated. Much of the ways of thinking you are criticizing here feel to me, as an autistic person, to be distinctly autistic. (But donât just take my word for it! I am only one autistic person.) I think that makes plausible that encouraging them might harm autistic people in one way. But it also means that criticizing them can be stigmatizing. I have already spent a lot of emotional energy on the idea that there is something very wrong and bad and evil with how I process things, related to some of the themes of this post. In some ways, this might have been âhealthyâ in the sense of making me a better person, but it definitely didnât make me feel good about myself.
*I personally think that most EAs already think in roughly those ways before the encounter EA, but that is only a guess.
**If youâve seen The Sopranos, Tony arguably becomes mentally healthier by the end, but only because he has become more sociopathic and therefore feels less guilty. Fiction, yes, but definitely something that could plausibly happen to a real person.
***âMental wellbeing frameworks generally hold that all perspectives are valid, including things that EAâs ethical frameworks assert as bad/âwrong/âinvalidâ