Cnn a Negro Who Can Read Kanye
CNN's headquarters in Atlanta, Ga., on Aug. i, 2014.
Photo: Michael A. Schwarz/Bloomberg via Getty Images
On Monday night, CNN host Don Lemon led a panel word with three CNN commentators as they gleefully heaped contemptuousness on Kanye West for meeting with President Trump to discuss prison reform and for otherwise expressing support for the President (the video is beneath). Among other things, Due west was pilloried for being both ignorant and exploited. "Kanye West is what happens when Negroes don't read," CNN's Bakari Sellers said. CNN'due south Tara Setmayer pronounced him "the token Negro of the Trump administration."
While those comments received some attention (merely from conservative outlets, needless to say), the laughter-driven attacks on West for his well-publicized medical handling for mental health bug were largely ignored. Simply those comments, broadcast in prime number-time by CNN on television and then widely disseminated by the network on social media, were non just reprehensible, but genuinely dangerous.
"No one should be taking Kanye West seriously," Setmayer decreed. Why not? Because, she said, "he conspicuously has issues. He'south already been hospitalized." Let'southward repeat that:No 1 should exist taking Kanye Due west seriously. He clearly has problems. He's already been hospitalized.
Setmayer was referring to West'due south 2016 hospitalization in Los Angeles's Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Middle. In 2018, West spoke publicly and bravely about that hospitalization and the medical handling he has received for his mental wellness struggles, including a bipolar diagnosis. West described how his doctors found the right balance of medication and therapies and he decided to speak publicly about his medical treatment because, in his words, "I desire to modify the stigma of mental health."
A screenshot of the Teen Vogue article discussing West's mental health word.
Screenshot: The Intercept
That was precisely the stigma that CNN and its various personalities exploited, played with and strengthened past weaponizing Due west's medical treatment against him, using it to disqualify him as someone who can be regarded as credible or serious.
After mocking Due west for his hospitalization, Setmayer rapidly added: "You know not to trivialize mental health issues" – something she had just blatantly washed and then proceeded immediately to practise again, adding: "but I mean obviously, Kanye has taken a turn in a very foreign way. You lot read any of his interviews, go back and read his interview with Charlamagne tha God. It's all over the place." Not only did Lemon nor any of the other panelists object, simply they maintained their laughing, giggling tone as this mockery was spouted.
Amazingly, after the segment was aired, CNN seemed not to be ashamed just quite proud of information technology, as information technology promoted information technology online to its Twitter audience:
It should go without proverb that West, every bit a public figure expressing controversial political views, is off-white game to exist criticized, harshly or otherwise, for the substance of what he says and does. But exploiting his medical treatment for mental health issues to declare him unworthy of being heard, or being incapable of denoting thought, is grotesque.
Mental health professionals, particularly those who specialize in the effects of social stigma on individuals with mental illness, have told the Intercept that the kinds of comments aired past CNN oft prevent patients from seeking the treatment they need due to the shame associated with these conditions – a fearfulness-driven failure that frequently results in allowing these conditions to go untreated, sometimes leading to permanent depression, incapacity and even suicide.
Worse, they said, the CNN give-and-take exploited, and lent credibility to, narrow-minded attitudes toward people who have been treated for mental health weather condition, attitudes which often prevent them from finding employment or even shelter.
Psychology Professor Patrick Corrigan, one of the nation's leading scholars on the harms of societal stigmas fastened to mental health treatment and the author of a new book entitled "The Stigma Effect," told the Intercept that Setmayer's comments "are troubling even if 1 does not similar Donald Trump or his constituency." The commentary from CNN, he said, "is stigma – in the same category equally racism and sexism. Information technology tries to minimize someone's opinion not because of the spirit of the message, only considering mental disease is some kind of slur confronting one's character."
Professor Corrigan emphasized that this "stigma'southward effects are not lilliputian. Inquiry quite clearly shows employers don't want to rent people with mental illness. Landlords don't want to rent to them. Health care professionals provide a substandard level of intendance. And all of this is due to the stigmatizing label."
A screenshot of an article in the Association for Psychological Science discussing research around the stigma of mental illness.
Screenshot: The Intercept
In a 2014 research commodity published past Corrigan and two other scholars, entitled "The Impact of Mental Affliction Stigma on Seeking and Participating in Mental Wellness Intendance," data shows that while "treatments accept been adult and tested to successfully reduce the symptoms and disabilities of many mental illnesses," many "people distressed by these illnesses often do not seek out services or choose to fully appoint in them. One gene that impedes care seeking and undermines the service system is mental illness stigma." The paper added:
Stigma is a pregnant barrier to care seeking and participation (Corrigan, 2004). More than than 100 peer-reviewed, empirical articles have been published supporting some aspect of how stigma serves as a barrier (Clement et al., 2013). Research has demonstrated stigma to exist a problem for elders (Graham et al., 2003), adults (Vogel, Wade, & Hackler, 2007), adolescents (Chandra & Minkovitz, 2007), and children (Adler & Wahl, 1998).
One of the almost damaging stereotypes, the paper documented, is that "people with mental disease are oft seen as incompetent" – precisely the stereotype CNN peddled about Due west. Every bit the researchers put it: "people attempt to escape the unfair loss of opportunity that comes with stigmatizing labels by not going to clinics or interacting with mental wellness providers with whom the prejudice is associated (Corrigan, 2004). (The fear is that someone will call up, 'Hey that guy coming out of the psychiatrist's function must be wacko and incompetent!')."
Another leading scholar on the damage washed from mental wellness stigma, Psychology Professor Stephen Hinshaw of the University of California at Berkeley, said of the CNN segment that while "mental illness" is real, "using the term to cast aspersions on what an individual is saying or doing (a) takes away the underlying message and meaning and (b) conspicuously contributes to the still-pervasive stigma related to mental illness, even in 2018."
Professor Hinshaw noted the "long history of discounting someone'south political views by attributing them to an underlying mental illness. After all," he told the Intercept, "if you're crazy, then anything you lot say can be completely discounted." Indeed, as Professor Hinshaw noted, exploiting mental health diagnoses to malign and discredit political adversaries has a long and truly ugly lineage.
As the Chicago Tribune reported in 2007, "the Soviet Union routinely locked upwardly dissidents in asylums," and post-Soviet Russian authorities "are increasingly returning to psychiatry to suppress political opponents or punish activists, according to human-rights organizations and other watchdog groups." Prc's abuse of psychiatric treatment to malign dissidents is well-documented. And in the U.S., weaponizing mental health diagnoses to marginalize dissidents has been a common practice.
What makes CNN'southward willingness to stigmatize mental health treatment all the more reprehensible is that only iv months ago, their ain colleague, CNN host Anthony Bourdain, committed suicide simply days afterwards fashion designer Kate Spade had done the same thing. Those high-profile suicides provoked a much-needed national discussion about what headlines chosen "the dangers of mental wellness stigma."
Chef Anthony Bourdain speaks onstage with Patrick Radden Keefe at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on Oct. vii, 2017 in New York City.
Photo: by Craig Barritt/Getty Images for The New Yorker
As one article on Bourdain and Spade'due south deaths put it in citing a new report from the Centre for Affliction Control: "In 2016 alone, most 45,000 people in the The states took their own lives, making suicide the 10th leading cause of death." One major factor is that "those living with the mental health struggles that lead to suicide often don't seek treatment or open up to friends and family about their deep despair." The reason is that people from all social classes – including those in the public eye – "feel the need to hibernate their suffering because of the heavy stigma that surrounds mental illness."
To lookout Bourdain's ain network, CNN, promote a reckless, giggly segment a mere four month after his tragic expiry that explicitly endorses and wields this stigma – by pronouncing that those who struggle with mental health issues should not be taken seriously and have no role in public soapbox – is null short of sickening.
This, of course, is all function and parcel of what has become the anything-goes mentality when it comes to demonizing those perceived as comparatively critical of Trump. Nosotros've seen Democrats and allied media figures similarly comprehend homophobia and reckless jingoism when they believe doing so is justified considering their goals are politically noble.
Just what CNN only did is a new – and uniquely dangerous – low in this gutter game. At that place are all sorts of legitimate means to critique and fifty-fifty mock Kanye West if that'due south what ane wants to do. Laughingly exploiting the fact that he previously received medical treatment for mental health atmospheric condition is the opposite of legitimate. It's the precise behavior that has driven people with mental health issues underground, hiding in shame, and too afraid – for good reason – to seek the handling they need and deserve out of fearfulness that people like the ones who composed this CNN panel will use it against them.
Source: https://theintercept.com/2018/10/11/mental-health-professionals-denounce-cnn-and-don-lemons-show-for-mocking-and-stigmatizing-kanye-wests-hospitalization/
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