Colonisers don’t have “personality disorders”
Originally written for Just Femme and Dandy
ID: a screenshot of a tweet that says, “DARVO— Deny, Attack, Reverse the Victim and Offender— a psychological manipulation technique Zionists love to use. It’s a combination of gaslighting and blame-shifting so the abuser can avoid responsibility for their actions. Make no mistake, #Israel is using emotional manipulation tactics right out of the NPD playbook (it’s abuse and it’s effective bc it weakens the real victim). This type of manipulation will work on someone who has never dealt with the narcisstic personality disordered, and those who don’t think critically. Those of us who’ve had the misfortune of having NPD people in our lives see exactly what Israel is doing— using the Dark Triad playbook. It’s Machiavellian, and that’s an understatement.
If it’s one thing that our movement spaces seem to be consistent at it’s alienating disabled people.
From refusing to require masks at Palestine solidarity protests while an airborne virus continues to rage across the globe, permanently disabling people, to openly vilifying psychiatrised and neurodivergent people.
Over and over, in supposed solidarity with Palestine, we’ve seen people confidently diagnose oppressors with “personality disorders”, especially Narcissistic Personality Disorder. And before NPD became the trendiest label to equate with violence, it was often psychosis, or just a “personality disorder” in general.
But colonisers do not have "personality disorders", and it seems that many of us have no idea how to criticise anything without using ableism. We’re being told that Zionists use manipulation techniques that are right out of “the NPD playbook” by people who seem to have very little understanding of how psychiatric diagnoses come to be created in the first place and how they’ve been historically used to exert social control.
We’re witnessing people weaponise psychiatric diagnoses as insults, having no idea what populations "personality disorder" diagnoses even represent or the many ways that the discrimination towards these diagnoses harms the same populations they’re supposedly trying to liberate.
For one, a very large portion of people diagnosed with personality disorders are abuse survivors, and, as I've written about repeatedly, these diagnoses render survivors much more susceptible to revictimisation-- in part because of how pervasive the beliefs that people labelled with them are abusive.
Imagine you're an abuse survivor diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder or Borderline Personality Disorder. And, yes, surviving abuse is often the only prerequisite for many people to receive these diagnoses. Imagine how this diagnosis then becomes a weapon in the hands of your abuser to portray you as the abuser and themselves as the victim. A common tactic that abusers use called DARVO becomes much more easily perpetrated when a victim bears a clinical label that both severs their trauma responses from the abuse they experienced and is so heavily associated with being abusive and dangerous.
This insistence that colonisers must have a mental illness stems from beliefs that people labelled mentally ill are innately dangerous, harmful, defective and disposable. But many Indigenous people, trans and GNC people, people of the Global South, etc., are given these labels— populations already deemed disposable. Movements that vilify any psychiatrised population fail to understand that they’re contributing to the discrimination of people from the same oppressed communities whose liberation they’re invested in.
As a person who has spent my life in the Global South, it’s deeply infuriating when anyone who claims to be invested in collective liberation demonises psychiatrised and neurodivergent people, when borders are not only disabling but also ableist. Borders create disability, illness and distress, and simultaneously limit migration on the basis of ability.
And because of the global spread of psychiatric knowledge as objective and universal truth, many people across the Global South have been given these diagnoses, suppressing Indigenous ways of sense-making of their experiences, as these frameworks are meant to help them understand their suffering.
Our biomedical frameworks for mental and emotional distress teach us to locate the source of a person’s struggles entirely within themselves, and yet a lot of what we’re diagnosing as mental illness are actually people’s responses to oppression. There seems to be rising understanding of this with regards to experiences like anxiety and depression, but we haven’t seen a lot of that understanding extend to more heavily-discriminated “disorders”, like “personality disorders”.
In this context, with the understanding that many oppressed peoples are labelled with psych diagnoses because of the ways they’ve adapted to survive their oppression, the assertion that people with NPD or any other personality disorder diagnosis are inherently dangerous and defective starts looking as problematic and harmful as it actually is.
Remember also that carcerality and punishment still lie at the core of our mental health system. Consider, then, how easy it becomes to victimise and dispose of individuals from certain populations when you psychiatrise them, and how nebulous much of the criteria for personality disorder diagnoses are so that they can be applied to populations as necessary.
Incarceration, othering, stripping people of their rights and freedoms become so much more socially acceptable when someone bears a psychiatric label, because they're done in the name of "care" and public safety, and because the people with these diagnoses have been so thoroughly dehumanised and othered. Many of you don't even see people with these diagnoses as part of your liberation movements. Instead, you keep labelling oppressors with personality disorders, further othering people with these diagnostic labels. Yet many people bearing personality disorder diagnoses are complex trauma survivors and I guarantee you that many of them are a part of your movements and fighting alongside you for a world in which they and other survivors can thrive as well while you demonise them.
As Disability and Transformative Justice organiser and educator, Mia Mingus states, “In an incredibly able-bodied supremacist and ableist society, challenging the deeply entrenched belief that disability and disabled people are not disposable, tragic and ugly burdens is radical – including within our movements for social justice. Social justice movements do not take place in a vacuum and many of our movements continue to support and actively perpetuate ableist notions and practices.”
Understanding disabled, psychiatrised and neurodivergent people as vital parts of our movements and our communities, and refusing to sideline them to the margins, is how we push back against abled supremacy that defines who is worthy of belonging and freedom and being seen as a full human being.
It's incredibly harmful and undermining to our goals that we keep equating psychiatrised and neurodivergent people with oppressors and that we keep contributing to their dehumanisation. We can’t build our movements upon ableist, oppressive logics of sorting bodies and minds into ‘desirable’ and ‘disposable’ categories.
People labelled with NPD— as with any mental illness label— are not always given these labels on the basis of their actions, but also just on the basis of how they think, feel and perceive the world. And in a world that has, for a very long time, segregated disabled, Mad and neurodivergent people from society, there’s nothing radical about us perpetuating these same dynamics.
Psychiatry has promoted this very entrenched us-vs-them dichotomy between the 'sane' and the 'mentally ill' to the point that many of you who demonise psychiatric diagnoses feel that there's a substantial distance between you and 'those people'. You never even stop to think about who 'those people' are. Who you're demonising.
What they've survived, what it must cost them to bear a diagnosis so scapegoated for everything. They're all one disposable, homogeneous mass to you.
But people with psychiatric diagnoses and neurodivergences are not disposable, and that includes people with personality disorder diagnoses. We cannot build any movement upon the assumed disposability of whole groups of people. We can't build any movement on sanism, when it can-- and has been-- easily used to undermine all movements.
So many people still don't see sanism as a legitimate, violent form of oppression and that gives it incredible power.
For more of my writing and my work, sign up to my mailing list here.