Mental Illness In the Political & Media Class

Is Ex-WaPo journalist Taylor Lorenz the tip of the iceberg?

In one of Cicero’s letters to a friend, he references Pompey the Great’s decision to divorce his wife, Mucia. Cicero attributes it to Pompey’s discovery that she was having an affair with Julius Caesar. Cicero believed that Caesar had many affairs with the wives of Roman patricians, and he perceived this as a sign that Caesar was a dangerously aggressive man.

Pompey apparently didn’t take the matter too seriously, and according to Suetonius, he humorously called Caesar "Aegisthus," the name of a Greek mythological character who was known to have seduced a king's wife. It’s likely that Pompey later regretted not taking it seriously when Caesar waged war against him and defeated him in the so-called “Caesar’s civil war.”

It takes a lot of energy, drive, and ambition to get ahead in this competitive world, but I’ve often wondered if these advantageous traits are sometimes—or perhaps even frequently—combined with mental disorders.

In recent years I have watched many prominent figures in the public forum say and do things that strike me as expressive of a mental disorder.

According to the NIH National Institute of Mental Health:

Mental illnesses are common in the United States and around the world. It is estimated that more than one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness (59.3 million in 2022; 23.1% of the U.S. adult population). Mental illnesses include many different conditions that vary in degree of severity, ranging from mild to moderate to severe. Two broad categories can be used to describe these conditions: Any Mental Illness (AMI) and Serious Mental Illness (SMI). AMI encompasses all recognized mental illnesses. SMI is a smaller and more severe subset of AMI. Additional information on mental illnesses can be found on the NIMH Health Topics Pages.

Surveying the literature, I see that many mental health researchers estimate that around 20% of Americans live with a mental illness. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has published the following graphic.

This morning I was reminded of this when I saw a Dec. 2 report in the New York Post about the former Washington Post columnist, Taylor Lorenz, who made the following bizarre statement on her Blysky social media page.

I wasn’t sure about the meaning of “raw dogging,” so I looked it up. As I suspected, it means to have sex without a condom. In other words, in Taylor Lorenz’s weird mind, to breathe air unmediated by a mask is the unhygienic equivalent of sexual intercourse with a stranger without a condom.

Turns out that Lorenz continues to wear a mask in public because, she claims, she has a pre-existing condition that puts her at elevated risk if she acquires a respiratory infection.

Wikipedia presents the following biography:

According to The Caret, Lorenz's reporting frequently concerns "Silicon Valley venture capitalists, marketers and ... anyone curious about how the internet is shaping the ways in which humans express themselves and communicate".

Fortune named her to its "40 Under 40" list in 2020, saying that she has "cemented herself as a peerless authority" whose name became "synonymous with youth culture online" during her time at The Daily Beast and The Atlantic. The same year, Adweek included her on its list of "Young Influentials Who Are Shaping Media, Marketing and Tech", saying that she "contextualizes the internet as we live it". Reason magazine credited her with popularizing the term "OK boomer" in a story declaring "the end of friendly generational relations.”

There is, it seems to me, something inherently whacky about this entire bio, and it immediately reminded me of the improbable rise of Professor Otto Silenus in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall.

It begins when the wealthy young heiress, Margot Beste-Chetwynde (a thinly veiled caricature of ocean liner heiress Nancy Cunard) acquires and demolishes what is universally regarded as the most beautifully intact Tudor manor house in all of England.

To replace this historical masterpiece, she hires a young and handsome aspiring architect from Hamburg, Germany named Professor Otto Silenus.

It was Otto Friedrich Silenus's first important commission. 'Something clean and square', had been Mrs Beste-Chetwynde's instructions, and then she had disappeared on one of her mysterious world-tours, saying as she left: 'Please see that it is finished by the spring.'

Professor Silenus—for that was the title by which this extraordinary young man chose to be called—was a 'find' of Mrs Beste-Chetwynde's. He was not yet very famous anywhere, though all who met him carried away deep and diverse impressions of his genius. He had first attracted Mrs Beste-Chetwynde's attention with the rejected design for a chewing-gum factory which had been reproduced in a progressive Hungarian quarterly. His only other completed work was the décor for a cinema-film of great length and complexity of plot—a complexity rendered the more inextricable by the producer's austere elimination of all human characters, a fact which had proved fatal to its commercial success. He was starving resignedly in a bed-sitting-room in Bloomsbury, despite the untiring efforts of his parents to find him—they were very rich in Hamburg—when he was offered the commission of rebuilding King's Thursday. 'Something clean and square'—he pondered for three hungry days upon the aesthetic implications of these instructions, and then began his designs.

'The problem of architecture as I see it,' he told a journalist who had come to report on the progress of his surprising creation of ferro-concrete and aluminium, 'is the problem of all art—the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form. The only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men. I do not think it is possible for domestic architecture to be beautiful, but I am doing my best. All ill comes from man,' he said gloomily; 'please tell your readers that. Man is never beautiful; he is never happy except when he becomes the channel for the distribution of mechanical forces.'

In other words, if it weren’t for the patronage of Margot Beste-Chetwynde, Otto Silenus would have probably continued to languish in obscurity with his obscurantist preoccupations.

I wonder what influential man or woman saw promise in Taylor Lorenz and supported her career advancement. With her aggressive post about her hygienic book launch, she revealed her mental derangement in such a conspicuous way that it drew the attention of the New York Post. However, I wonder if she is merely an extreme example of poor mental health among public figures.

If one in five adults in the U.S. lives with mental illness, could it be that a similar proportion of U.S. adults who are active in the public forum—perhaps even holding leadership positions—are suffering from mental illness?