[ditonal]

Thanks for your help correcting a really common misconception about bipolar disorder.

People want to whitewash mental illness because mental illness can be scary and uncomfortable. There’s this concept of destigmatizing mental illness by pretending all sorts of bad behavior are somehow not associated with mental illness. This is often done to make people with minor mental illness feel less stigmatized but ironically can increase the stigma around people with more severe mental illness since now it’s not mental illness, they’re just a terrible terrible person.

Yes, psychosis absolutely can cause people to be antisemitic, racist, violent, etc. This should almost be obvious. But because it opens up difficult conversations about accountability, and because people with minor mental illness want sympathy without stigma, people like to pretend otherwise.