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I have a grand theory that ties together several factors: human identity; the stigma around mental illness; and the refusal of many autists to even consider taking a cure, if they were offered one. I’m going to explain it to you. This isn’t merely an academic exercise, so bear with me.1
Human identity is layered, in a sense. We aren’t equally attached to every aspect of ourselves. Your foot is simply something you have, a part of you, surely, but not an essential aspect. Your mind, including your personality and your unique style of thinking and experiencing the world, on the other hand, is absolutely essential. You are your mind. You can replace almost every part of you and still be you, but not your mind. If I say, “I lost my foot in an accident”, the implication is that it’s still me, sans a foot, but if I say, “I lost my mind”, literally, the implication is that for a moment, I wasn’t myself, I was — or was acting as — a completely different person. They say you can’t step into the same river twice, everything being in flux and all, but some aspects of you are fairly constant while others change very much over time, sometimes over a short period of time. Personality — mind, cognitive processing — is one such aspect. At least, this is how human psychology works. Your mind is a constant through your life, and it is extremely attached to itself and its own ways. Human identity is built on this. It’s the essence of identity because our identity is for the most part an intuitive phenomenon, and we can change almost anything in radical ways without ruining identity, but the moment you start messing with someone’s mind, intuition says you’re making them into another person, not simply an altered version of themselves.2
This is my analysis of human identity as experienced by individuals, not a proposal for how we ought to really think about identity. This is how we think (if I’m right, of course); like it or not, this is how we collectively and individually, explicitly and implicitly define and deal with identity. It’s not how we should think about identity. That, I do not know.
There’s a reason why there’s something called an identity crisis and that identity crises are fairly common, but can be emotionally devastating. Identity is really, really important to human happiness. Confusion about personal identity or disapproval of it, either by yourself or by others, can really, really fuck you up. Sometimes for good.
A physical disease is easy to distinguish from the person suffering from the disease, at least in the abstract. If we ignore whatever actions a person may have done that led to them getting a disease and simply consider a patient X, whose circumstances we know nothing about except that X has a given physical disease, we have no cause to blame X or consider X inferior to us. X, as far as we’re concerned, is simply unfortunate to have contracted this disease or condition, be it Salmonellosis, a common cold, HIV, or a missing leg. None of these affect the aspects of a person that, to humans, are essential aspects of identity.
But consider mental illness. When there’s something wrong with your foot, or your heart, there’s something wrong with your foot or heart, not you. You aren’t necessarily at fault. When we abstract away the details of a specific case and imagine a patient X, whose circumstances we know nothing about except that X has a given mental disease, it becomes very hard to isolate X from the illness. A person with a foot there’s something wrong with is simply a person with a bad foot, but a person with a bad mind isn’t simply a person with a bad mind. A person with a bad mind is a bad person, because mind is so closely linked with identity. You are your mind. Therefore, whatever properties your mind has, you have. If your mind is smart, you’re smart. If your personality is cheerful and optimistic, you aren’t simply a person with an optimistic personality, you’re an optimistic person. This is who you are. And when you’re a person with a mental illness — with a bad mind — you are a Bad Person.
I’m not at all trying to say that people with mental illnesses are bad people. However, I think the above explains pretty well how the social stigma surrounding mental illness arises. I have long suspected that human identity is actually incoherent, but that parts of it can at times operate without encountering contradictory parts, so that we often get sensible results even if, when you probe and push the fringe cases, it all breaks down. Identity = mind, and so we unconsciously or consciously transfer attributes of one to the other. I’m not saying it should be this way, but it is. When I wrote, “you are a Bad Person”, that was a reflection of this tendency. I have a counter-tendency, sympathy for these people, which means that I can recognize the folly of jumping from “illness of the mind” to “illness of the soul”, from “mental illness” to “bad mind” to “bad person”, but the original tendency is still there and strong as ever, and I don’t think this counter-tendency does anything to change the fundamental fact that the human conception of identity revolves around Mind = Identity.
Consider far-ranging abnormalities in personality. I’m using abnormality in the strict sense of deviating from the statistical norm (genius is an abnormality), so it doesn’t have to be negative, but usually, these abnormalities make life harder for the individual, if only because society is setup for people without them. Suppose you’re born with or early on develop a cognitive profile that puts you at a big disadvantage in society, but also gives you a unique perspective on things and maybe some unique abilities, maybe none at all. There’s a strong tendency to call this an illness, a disease, a disorder. If you develop abnormally, and if you develop abnormally in many ways, you might call it a Pervasive Developmental Disorder. As it turns out, there is a group of conditions that fall under this umbrella. They span a spectrum from geeky but functional to completely unable to handle everyday life and a near complete inability to communicate. From severe autism to Asperger’s. People with PDDs have abnormal personalities and often abnormal ways of experiencing the world (their subjective experience of their senses often differs from how normal people touch, smell, taste, see and hear). A surprising fact is that, while there’s lots of research into a cure,3 among those with PDDs who can communicate, a large number of them voice a principled rejection of any form of cure. Even when their condition puts them at a tremendous disadvantage in society, even when it brings them suffering daily, and even when they desperately desire the traits of normal people (again, as in “in accordance with the statistical norm”, sans value judgments), they don’t want to be cured!
I think there are two reasons for this. The first is that taking a cure is an admission that there’s something wrong with you, and specifically with your mind. Since personality and thinking style is at the core of identity, the intuitive thing seems to be to push this onto the very core of what makes you you. The wrongness becomes an unremovable taint upon your soul: scarred for life, bad forever, and this is so attached to your identity that the only way to get rid of it is to drag your identity up by its roots. In effect, this sets up an equality You = Bad Person, and it’s hopeless to disentangle these two from each other. Only by destroying what makes you you can you remove The Essential Badness of Your Soul.
I hope and expect that I can rely on my audience to fill in the gaps here. Everyone understands the horror of such a scenario. Destroying your personality completely is the only way to get rid of the badness, but this is tantamount to suicide.4 Not destroying it means living as a Bad Person with a Bad Personality.
That brings us to the second reason. We have a tremendous fear of dying.5 I don’t think of the fear of radical identity changes as an expression of literal fear of death. I’m not saying the lizard brain that lights up when you are in a life-threatening situation and ensures you are appropriately scared shitless is the same mechanism that makes people with PDDs fear being “cured”. I’m saying that we’re very, very attached to our identities. I suspect there are many cognitive mechanisms in our brain to protect that identity, both from unwanted change and from undesirable and unconstructive criticism. Going through a full-on transformation of your personality and perception is more like suicide and reincarnation than it’s like any other kind of change. It feels like you’re stabbing yourself in the back, killing off yourself, so that you can die and reincarnate as something completely different. I have huge problems even imagining the resulting person as the same person who started the transformation. Because of the intuition that Mind = Identity, it feels like someone whose every aspect of mind has changed is no longer that person, but someone else. Would you be satisfied with commiting suicide if you knew someone else would live? That sounds absurd. It also sounds like what a full-on transformation of the mind would be like.
There are many taxonomies that try to divide up the space of human personalities in discrete dimensions. One taxonomy that’s very popular on the internet is the Jungian Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which divides personality into four axes or dimensions: extraversion/introversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling and judging/perceiving. By determining which of the extremes you’re closest to on each axis, you get a handy four-letter type (ESTJ, INTP, etc.) that tells you who you are, and picks out which of the sixteen personality types you fit. Making a test that determines which of these a person fits is relatively easy, and the tests may even assign you the same type each time you take it! This taxonomy is also not very evidence-based.
From what I understand, the most empirically well-supported taxonomy of human personalities is The Big Five. In this taxonomy, there are five dimensions: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. The Big Five were not individual speculations, but were found by examining language: they are the axes by which we most commonly talk about people’s personalities. Their predictive ability is also unsurpassed among taxonomies of personality. With that in mind, consider this thought experiment:
Imagine you’re an open and curious person, not cynical, and trusting. You thrive on change and ever-changing environments, you function under pressure and in new situations, but you find routine and schedules rigid, boring, and difficult to maintain, so you forget, come late and might be a little careless, but not in a malicious way. You’re social: you thrive on other people’s company, you seek it out and find that it replenishes your mental reservoirs. You have many friends and acquaintances. You’re cooperative and compassionate. Your mood’s more up and down than flat. You can be very sad, and very happy, but you’re mostly happy or content. Math scares you.
Imagine you get the choice of taking a pill that changes your personality in the following way: you become hostile to or bored by new ideas, art, and new people; you’re good with routine, you do everything on time and according to the rules, but you’re completely lost whenever something unexpected happens; you’re the opposite of a people-person, unsocial, not good at social interaction and uncomfortable with other people, and social interaction tires you; you can’t cooperate, and regard other people as threaths; your mood if consistent, but low, so there are few ups and downs; and you’re a math wiz. Would you take the pill?
I think few would. Not only because the pill sounds like it would make you less happy. I don’t think you would even if you were in a depression and desperately wanted many of the personality traits the pill could give you. In the thought experiment, I essentially presented two extremes of the axes of the Big Five and asked you if you’d like to switch from one to the other. I think that even people very unhappy with themselves would hesitate. It’s such a huge step. We’re so attached to our identities, and taking that pill, making that jump, it’s like suicide. It’s scary, it’s unwanted. It feels like giving up yourself. It feels like the ultimate in fakery: like donning a mask, and then removing what’s behind the mask, so that only the mask remains. Before you ask someone to make such a jump, and before you ask why they won’t, ask yourself whether you would.
To explain why people with PDDs are wary of taking such a pill — which, I hasten to add, does not exist now and probably won’t ever exist in such an extreme form — it gets worse. Not only personality, but the very way we experience the world varies. Various sensory hyper- and hyposensitivities often accompany PDDs. A light touch, pleasant to most people, can be torture; a smell can feel like an assault; symmetries in space can stand out bright and clear while facial expressions are mysteries; the world could be a kaleidoscopic smear of too much information at the same time. Thinking for some might feel very different from how thinking feels for most people. In addition to asking people to leave their personalities behind, you’re also asking them to leave their whole style of thinking in the thrash.
A life spent considering oneself a defect soul, a blemish upon Earth, a production error, isn’t a viable life. It’s a life that with a direct route to depression and suicide. If I’m right that human identity as humans see it is about personality, about how we think, then it becomes very, very important for people with PDDs not to view themselves as sick. As I explained above, I think that the stigma around mental illness has to do with the identification of faults of the mind with faults of the soul, but the situation is even worse with the autistic spectrum. If someone has an ordinary mental illness, they’ve been different before. Another tendency in the human perception of identity is that people retain identity over time. Although I of today and I of one year ago are different in many ways, and although I of now and I of seven years hence may not even share a single cell, we still view them as the same person. A person who has an ordinary mental illness has been well, has been a normal person, and so there’s an argument to be made that it’s the same, normal person under a temporary spell of sickness. PDDs, if they are illnesses, are permanent. They’ve always been this way. There is no longer any sensible argument that this is temporary, that this is a lapse and not a representation of their one true self. Identification with the illness, if it is seen as an illness, becomes inevitable.
From the perspective of someone with some form of autism, then, viewing autism as a disease, and for which there could be a cure, seems to lead to viewing oneself as an inherent failure. I don’t think many people have this reasoned out explicitly, but I definitely think something like this is going on unconsciously.
Where does this leave us? Well, if you’ve read this far, I hope I’ve been able to tell you something you maybe weren’t aware of about identity. I hope I’ve made my case for the destructive effects our conception of identity can have on selfworth, confidence and happiness whenever there’s something odd, off or wrong with our heads. And I hope I’ve given you something to think about.
Notes
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As a child I was certified geek. I had never heard about it, and I wanted nothing to do with it. This long-winded post is, in a way, an attempt to deal with the feelings that surfaced then and have resurfaced since. At first, I completely rejected the label. I did not want anything to be wrong with me, because, for reasons explained in this article, this was to me the same as me being a bad person. If my mind was sick, I was a sick person, a perverted subhuman. It would destroy my self-confidence and will to live. I think the refusal to acknowledge or even learn anything more about this weird “Asparagus Disorder”, as the name sounded to me — at least it did when I wanted it to seem silly, so I could dismiss it out of hand — was a defense mechanism. Later I learned more about it, and I came to recognize some of the traits in me, while still being skeptical about others. I still am. I’m not sure the diagnosis is correct, but it was made by experienced professionals (who also do make mistakes sometimes, as everyone does). This isn’t a shady self-diagnosis.
I’m also uncertain about what good having the diagnosis has done me. If it is correct, maybe it would still have been better for me not to know it. It can fuck up your self confidence good. When I feel lonely and isolated, I think about the diagnosis and fear that I will never have a meaningful relationship in my life; that it isn’t just the time and place, but that, since AS is an integral part of me, I will never change for the better. I feel unmalleable, set in stone. Having a diagnosis can be a relief for some — there’s an explanation for why I’m like this! — but it can also make you unconstructively fatalistic. By all means, skip this post if you feel it’s too long, too analytic or (the opposite) too emotional. But know that it is a brutally honest and personal post, and publishing it is more than a little scary. ↩
- I use the term intuition a lot. I talk about things seeming like this or that, like everyone thinks like me. This is a personal reflection, and my argument hinges on my observation about how we humans perceive identity. I don’t have science backing me up, but this observation is a combination of personal experience, behavior by others that leads me to think they feel the same way, and thought experiments. You can do the thought experiment yourself: try imagining different parts of you being different. Consider which changes feel like they’re slightly different you’s and which feel like they’re completely different people. I think you’ll find that if you replace your mind with that of someone else, you’re no longer you, but if you change just about everything else, it would still feel like a (very altered, alternative version of) yourself. ↩
- Many people don’t like the word cure at all, since it’s associated with disease and there being something wrong with you, which for reasons I’m trying to explain in this text — some of which should be obvious — aren’t properties people want to ascribe to themselves. If I can be cured, presumably that’s because there’s something wrong with me, and if the part of me there’s something wrong with is my mind, then because of the way we associate mind and identity, the conclusion that seems natural is that it’s me there’s something wrong with, that I’m a Bad Person, that I am immoral, wrong, that I deserve it. People will make extreme sacrifices to avoid coming to that conclusion, naturally. Whenever I hear the word illness or disease describing a PDD I cringe. When I hear “disorder”, I’m a little less depressed, for some reason. ↩
- I have been hammering in the point that I think the human perception of identity is built on the assumption that Mind = Identity, i.e., you are your mind, and every property of your mind is a property of you. Completely changing your mind, i.e., your personality and the way you experience the world, will destroy the pre-existing identity. Because of Mind = Identity, destroying mind is destroying you. Voluntarily destroying your personality (even if it is to change into a new one) is voluntarily destroying yourself, which is the definition of suicide. ↩
- Unless you personally face certain death on a regular basis without blinking, do not tell me that suicide is cowardly. Dying by your own hand is a courageous act, for better or worse, since it requires facing one of our most universal horrors: death. Which all goes to show that courage is not a good thing in itself. Only when courage is used for a good purpose is it a good thing to have. ↩
