The Madness Taboo

For political reasons, psychiatry is doing its best to deny the existence of high-functioning madness

I have a persistent problem: My 16-year-old daughter is mad. She makes up stories about herself and believes in them. Sometimes she is going to be a professional figure skater. Sometimes a photo model: When she was 15 years old, she broke up with her grandparents because they wouldn't lend her their apartment in Stockholm, where she needed to live to take (non-existent) modelling jobs. She is oblivious to social facts. For example, she holds a persistent idea that she is going to save her younger siblings, especially a toddler brother she adores, from their substandard parents. When she encounters a person of authority, she constantly tries to negotiate with them, wringing out every possible advantage. She almost completely lacks any theory of mind: For example, she does things like meticulously hiding a carefully packaged bunch of notebooks in the ground and then leaving a digging spade next to the hiding place. She runs away and hides from all people she doesn't feel at ease with, including her social worker. In general, although her IQ level is very high, she seems to completely lack imagination of what people might be thinking of her.

I could go on and on and make the list longer. The point is, to the naked eye, Alma is crazy. You just need a little information about her behavior to agree that she most likely is delusional. Everyone who needs to deal with her for extended times finds that obvious: Her parents, the social workers, her foster parents.

Everyone, except her psychologists and psychiatrists. Yes, this is really perplexing. A psychologist I know says that a personality disorder should only be diagnosed if it is obvious enough for a bus driver to see it. But what do we call a case of madness that every bus driver could see, but psychologists fail to detect?

Almost two years ago, when Alma's first psychologist failed to see that she was dealing with an unusually mad patient, I believed I had just encountered an unusually stupid psychologist. When I asked the psychologist to help Alma fight her madness, the psychologist decided that I was the mad one and helped Alma to move into foster care. The foster parents then discovered rather quickly that Alma was actually mad. I did my very best to lobby to get the oblivious psychologist out of the picture. Eventually that succeeded and Alma got to meet another psychologist. And then another one.

And guess what: The new ones were even worse. They totally played along with whatever Alma said. For example, both Alma's parents and foster parents have noticed that Alma's alleged fear of germs is very uneven: Sometimes (most of the time) she can’t use utensils that someone else has picked out of the dishwasher, but then suddenly she can eat a hamburger from McDonald's if she is in the mood. But psychiatry just buys into whatever she says, without asking any questions and without verifying anything. And, most crucially, psychiatry helps Alma to become a totally lonely person. First it helped her to verbally attack her parents. A year later it helped her to do the same with her foster parents.

There is also a strange co-incidence. Before April 2025, Alma's caretakers did their best to shelter her from developing anorexia. We clearly knew the risk: Anorexia is heritable and runs in our family. And Alma always was extremely preoccupied with cooking and eating - she treated it as her main occupation. But in spite of her weird behavior around food, she remained normal weight. In April 2025 Alma started to see a new psychologist. And at the same time, she started to lose weight very rapidly. As if someone finally told her that if she wants the status of a queen who can constantly boss around people at will, she needs to actually be on the verge of death from starvation. In any case, that is what she is doing right now: She is in forced psychiatric care because of starvation, bossing around the staff as much as she can.

Before, I believed that psychologists understood people better than the average person does. I believed that learning to understand people better was what they used their five years at university for. I don't believe that any longer. I don't say that all psychologists are worse than the average person - a few are brilliant. But I wouldn't be the least surprised if the average psychologist is worse than the average person at understanding humans.

On a mission to obscure

It is not that I wasn't warned. I'm certainly not the first Westerner to discover that psychiatry is bad. Actually, I have heard so many complaints over psychiatry that I have gotten used to it. Now I have become another one of those countless people who complain. So the question is: Why is psychiatry so outrageously bad?

After weeks of pounding that question, the answer crept on me: Because psychiatry is political as much as scientific. It carries a politically sensitive question on its shoulders: How are humans?

That question is politically sensitive because it is closely related to the question What should be done? If humans are naturally good we should institute anarchy. If humans are naturally bad we need law and order. If most humans are good but some are bad we need a strong prison system to take away the bad guys. If humans are socially malleable we should invest heavily in social structures and try to eradicate all bad social environments.

Whatever people think should be done, they make assumptions of how humans are. And seldom the other way round. The question How are humans? is simply too important to be left to science.

It took me a long time to realize this. Throughout my adult life I vaguely believed that psychology and psychiatry were honest sciences, minus some political ideas around race and gender. I'm now starting to realize that Woke is just the tip of an iceberg. Last autumn I pointed out the confusion of the autism concept in a post called the The Anti-Autism Manifesto: A generation ago, autism meant an extremely serious condition, an almost vegetative state. Only a fraction of a percent of the population was supposed to have it. Then the diagnostic criteria were relaxed on two occasions. But not enough to actually fit those around five percent¹ of some cohorts that are diagnosed with autism. Read the diagnostic criteria for autism closely, and you will find that they are still rather freakish, far too specific to describe five percent of the population. Once a politically motivated trend started to diagnose children with autism, psychologists simply started to overstretch the criteria to fit more and more patients.

After looking into the autism mess, I naively suggested that psychiatry should become transparent and data-based and replace all its labels with a gigantic personality test. I now realize why this doesn't happen: because obscuring the complexity of human nature is actually psychiatry's job. Psychiatry’s function is not to treat all its patients the best way possible. Its main function is to talk about human nature in a way that appeals to the public as a whole. If people in general prefer not to know about the messiness of the human condition, then it is psychiatry's job to hide it.

Bad, sad, but not mad

In summary, psychiatry is glaringly deficient because it prioritizes what the public prefers to believe about human nature over what science says about human nature. For that reason, psychiatry is most of all effective in the biochemical sphere, where there is no direct competition with politics. As long as psychiatrists act like any doctors and ask patients about their condition and just give them medicine, they constitute no threat to the political order. As soon as psychiatrists start talking seriously with their patients, they will be competing with all the people who think they know how humans are. That is, people who think they know how humans are because they know what is the best way to run the society they are living in. From what I have seen of psychiatry so far, it looks like most psychiatry professionals meekly bend to the politically correct view of human nature of the day without even noticing that they are doing so.

Among all the politically sensitive questions, I think that the existence of madness is among the most sensitive. Actually, modern Western society is upholding a madness taboo. And for a good reason. Thinking about it, a madness taboo should be beneficial to society as a whole. If people knew that it is actually common that people are a bit delusional, everyone would accuse everyone of delusion at the slightest disagreement. People already accuse each other of being abusive, psychopaths, biased and misguided. Adding pathological delusion to that mess would make it even worse. People in power already overuse the opportunity to subtly label people who displease them in any way as crazy. For example, I studied a justice scandal (described by Anders here) where a 16 year old girl, who never did anything to seem crazy, was dismissed as unreliable just because she spoke against the orthodox narrative in a child protection case. Without a madness taboo, people in positions of authority would act that way and dismiss people who challenge them much more often.

While in no way perfect, the madness taboo protects against such abuses of power. The madness taboo says that unless a person is obviously psychotic, they should be assumed to be truthful and rational. Before my daughter's case proved otherwise, I also held exactly those beliefs. The madness taboo blocks information about everyday, relatively functional madness from travelling to and between members of the public. We need to discover it one by one if it ever appears in our personal lives.

That is manifested in the way personality disorders are talked about. A psychologist I know has revealed that psychologists jokingly call the three clusters of personality disorders Mad, Bad, Sad (the real names are A, B, C). The bad Cluster B is well-known to the public. Everyone has heard of psychopaths and narcissists. Borderline personality disorder is at least half-known. The sad Cluster C is well-known too: everyone has heard of obsessive-compulsive disorder, OCD, and various anxiety disorders such as social phobia. But before my daughter's madness appeared beyond doubt, I had never heard about any of the mad Cluster A personality disorders. Paranoid personality disorder, schizoid personality disorder and schizotypal personality disorder were unknown concepts to me. I hadn't heard about them even once. And when I tell people that I believe that my daughter has schizoid personality disorder they too look like they have never heard about it.

This is not because Cluster A personality disorders are particularly uncommon. To the contrary, a quick Google search says that mad Cluster A personality disorders are more common than bad Cluster B disorders. The only explanation I can find is that madness almost completely lacks a place in public discourse.

I in no way deny the benefits of the madness taboo. It greatly benefits people in subordinate positions that are actually not mad. There are countless situations when the madness taboo prevents people in power from dismissing uncomfortable information from their underlings. The madness taboo definitely benefits sane people lower down in the social hierarchy.

The problem with the madness taboo, is that it greatly hurts people who are actually mad. Because the madness taboo makes it almost impossible to maintain relationships with those people. Since there is a madness taboo, it is not allowed to say “x is mad, don't take things they say too seriously". Instead people in general and psychiatry in particular need to assume that x is not mad at all. Instead, everyone around x will look suspect, because so many strange and upsetting things are happening around x. The search for the culprit never ends. Everyone who dares to go near x risks being assumed to be the cause of the strange things that happen. And x couldn't agree more: whatever happens, it must be someone else's fault. By time, every person with any sense of self-preservation will avoid x.

Human sacrifice

This is, sadly, my daughter's current situation. She is locked up in a hospital. The social services have decided to stop paying people from a residential care home to accompany her, because she rejects them anyway.

I hoped that once the stream of new people had ceased, psychiatry would be unable to hide Alma's madness from themselves. Then they would have to talk to Anders and me and we would repeat the same message over and over: It is not just us. It is not only Alma's parents who consider Alma crazy. Her foster parents and her social worker have seen the same pattern as well. Please do something to help her see how the world actually works.

But as things are, psychiatry is perfectly capable of upholding the madness taboo also in the face of this information. They simply don't ask for it. Although Alma is constantly being supervised by psychiatrists and psychologists, those professionals actively avoid gathering any information about her condition from anyone but herself. If I want them to know anything, I have to throw the information on them so they can ignore it and write a note about me being a suspect person. Which is exactly how they treated the foster parents as well. Month after month, psychiatry staff repeat the same mantra: Now we need to focus on getting Alma to eat. Every other investigation needs to be postponed until the acute eating disorder has been resolved, they imply.

That way, Alma has gotten a haven from the various accusations of crazy behavior she encountered in the free world: A closed psychiatric ward. There psychiatrists and psychologists protect her from all attempts at confronting her worldview. The price she has to pay for this protection is to keep herself at a near-death level of starvation or to self-induce some other debilitating psychiatric condition. I'm not surprised at all that Alma is taking that deal: She was always on the lookout for a place where her way of being was accepted. Now she has found it.

Alma and psychiatry quite obviously have a goal in common: To deny that Alma is crazy. Together they are exploring alternative explanations: Phobias, anorexia, autism, evil family members and foster parents and social workers. The psychiatric staff who participate in this seem to be doing just fine. They get paid and seem to feel good about themselves for “helping Alma”. The one who pays the great price is Alma herself, who seems more likely to die from any of the self-harm disorders she develops under psychiatric care than to ever become fit for a life in freedom.

The longer this is going on, the more I believe that psychiatry is actually doing its job: To obscure the existence of madness in the best interests of the public. And I guess that in this grand scheme of things, sacrificing a few crazy people is considered a small price to pay.

1. Swedish statistics here https://www.socialstyrelsen.se/om-socialstyrelsen/pressrum/press/kraftig-okning-av-autism-bland-flickor/