Reclaiming the Radical Middle: What the Icarus Project Has to Say to Freddie deBoer (and the Media)
Mad Wisdom in an Age of Clickbait, Commodification, and Contempt
I want to be clear: I like reading Freddie deBoer. I find his critiques sharp, often brave, and rooted in lived experience. He’s been public about his diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, and as someone who’s also spent time navigating altered states and psychiatric labels, I see him as an ally in calling out the contradictions in both mainstream psychiatry and the activist responses to it. My hope is that this response doesn’t shut down the conversation, but opens it up—toward more truth, more care, and less shame.
In a series of recent essays, Freddie deBoer calls out what he sees as the commodification of mental disorders—particularly ADHD and autism—into identity brands and consumer products. He critiques mainstream media’s failure to question the social dynamics behind skyrocketing diagnoses and lambasts the performative, often superficial anti-psychiatry stances that circulate in elite cultural spaces. His frustration is palpable, especially when he points to Jane Pratt recommending The Great Pretender in New York Magazine while completely misunderstanding its premise: not a celebration of anti-psychiatry, but a debunking of one of its most famous founding myths.
We at The Icarus Project spent years living in the contradictions deBoer names—acknowledging the harms of psychiatric overreach and medical gatekeeping while also resisting the flattening of complex experiences into aestheticized online personas. Icarus emerged not as a rejection of psychiatry, but as a space to hold multiple truths: that psychiatric meds save lives and also destroy them, that identity can be liberating and limiting, that neurodiversity is real and sometimes disabling, that healing often requires collective frameworks that don’t reduce people to brain chemistry or rebellion.
What Freddie names as “gentrification of disability,” we once called the professionalization of madness: when authentic, messy, and relational experiences get packaged and resold in ways that benefit platforms and personalities more than communities. His critique of media that fails to grapple with nuance lands—but we also see a chance to move beyond just calling bullshit.
The T-MAPs project—Transformative Mutual Aid Practices—was built to shift the paradigm. Instead of diagnosing or labeling, it starts with the question: What keeps you well, and what do you want others to know if you’re struggling? It’s not a product, and it’s not a lifestyle—it’s a practice rooted in mutual care, political resistance, and personal narrative. It doesn’t deny suffering or glamorize it. It makes space for grief, survival, unexplainable states, and the practical needs of navigating the world.
Freddie wants a better discourse. We do too. But rather than dismissing the ADHD TikTokers or neurodivergent zine makers, we invite a third option: one that critiques the market logic and honors lived experience. That holds institutions accountable without scapegoating everyone who finds meaning in a diagnosis. That admits psychiatry is both essential and insufficient.
Dr. Awais Aftab’s recent NYT piece gets closer to this middle ground. It complicates the easy narratives around psychiatric medication, acknowledging both their benefits and their harms. His work, like ours, emerges from a desire for honesty—not ideological purity.
So here's our offering to the conversation: If you’re disillusioned by the mental health industry, if you’re sick of both performative self-diagnosis and top-down clinical arrogance—there’s another way. We’re building it. And we invite you to join us, not just as critics, but as co-creators of a culture that can hold complexity without commodifying it.
Just read the DeBoer "Gentrification of Disability" piece. It was infuriatingly clueless about both the abuses of the psychiatric system, and the humanity of those with "lower-functioning" autism, psychosis, etc. As someone for whom the medical model has successfully worked, he seems blind to the idea that someone might be genuinely suffering and yet also have very good rational reasons to refuse treatments. He groups the neurodivergent into two categories: the pretenders who are doing just fine but wear neurodivergent Pride labels in order to be trendy, and the seriously afflicted who are assumed to be completely incapable of speaking for themselves or even feeling for themselves. He compares the arrogance of privileged students protesting an "expert" (ie doctor) panel on autism treatment to the struggles of a mother caring for a nonverbal autistic son; why is he using the mother as a person we should empathize with here, and not the nonverbal autistic person himself? He compares the schizophrenia of Daniel Bergner writing in the New York Times that people like him should be treated more normally, to the schizophrenia of homeless people under bridges, saying that schizophrenic people sleeping under bridges "don't have the wherewithal" to speak to the New York Times. How would he know, given that neither he nor the New York Times has ever attempted to speak to one? ( I'm best friends with someone diagnosed schizophrenic who has slept under bridges. He has saved my life more than once. He despises the mental health workers who have locked him up for months at a time and put him in four-point restraints for hours at a time, and has a love/hate relationship with the family that has too often viewed him in terms of his diagnosis.)
The brutal truth that those who only look at the pretty, educated "disorder influencers" failed to acknowledge, is that before privileged people who were also diagnosed schizophrenic or autistic started speaking for the rest of the autistic schizos, the lower functioning people were spoken for entirely by doctors and family members. And that was way worse. Because doctors have a financial and an ego incentive to claim that their treatments work, and that if their patients refuse treatment it must be because they are too crazy to know what's good for them, and not because the treatments themselves are shit. And family... yes, we'd all like to think that family just acts out of care. But there's a lot of ego food in being the heroic carer of a burdensome disabled person, and for far less personal cost than coming out as "disordered" yourself. And labeling your child as born mentally ill is also a great way to discredit any abuse allegations from the child. (This was done to me.)
While not a big fan of diagnosis in general, I'm grateful to autism youtubers for explaining some of my struggles to me in ways that made sense and let me know I'm not alone. I was actually diagnosed as a child, but never had it explained to me fully, and came to see it mainly as something my parents used to invalidate me. Looking at the DSM today, their description of autism is still written in "about us, not to us" language that does not really describe the actual experience of having sensory sensitivities, meltdowns Etc. The neurodivergent movement is just better on this. Perhaps DeBoer would be interested in interviewing some people from the SpicyAutism reddit group in his next article? A forum dedicated to autistic people who have high support needs, but who also very much can speak for themselves. Because there is a lot in between "Harvard student who's just quirky normal" and "completely unable to communicate", and lots of us are angry and have things to say.
If anything, my complaint with the diagnosis influencers is that they don't glamorize madness enough. They are still too trapped in the language of doctors, the blind trust of doctors even when many of them fail to help us and actually hurt us. Prior to Freud and Charcot, we had "madness" which was dangerous but also had its meaning and beauty: there was divine madness, the madness of love. If we're going to feel the pain anyway, and a lot of us do despite having been on tons of different drugs, then why not have it be seen as part of the glorious human experience, and not just as a disease that makes us abnormal? If we're going to be different from the majority anyway, why shouldn't we be able to see ourselves as sometimes better instead of as always worse? Yes, including those of us who can't speak or sleep under bridges.
Sascha, I like where you're going with this, but I think you're being too charitable here. My comment is not in disagreement with anything you've written here, and I like where you end with the direction for moving forward, but I want to add why I think something like Icarus can't be reduced to its critical edge.
Though I often find myself annoyed or critical of the same tendencies, Freddie has built a large following through bad faith surface readings, and bitter, smug, mean-spirited screeds. His writing "career" is hardly more than a series of character assassinations, insults, and hate. When he has been intellectually bested in the past, he resorted to just straight slander. His writing evokes road rage, the violent discomfort of heat in the back of the throat before vomiting, or a teenage Myspace anti-parents outburst post when stuck inside on a Saturday night (something he seems to voluntarily choose to do all the time). To the contrary, your writing reminds me that we don't just need to be critical of the right things; we also need to cultivate tenderness, curiosity, and interest in one another. What's the point if we have to become insufferable assholes to make our attacks? This man and people like him are not our friends, and will never be comrades unless they were to change the way they engage with other human beings, because I don't get the sense they care about much more than being right.
On the commodification point, he has proven that it's at least as profitable to be "anti-anti-psychiatry" and "anti-self-diagnosis" as it is to be anti-psych or self-diagnose oneself with ADHD on TikTok or whatever (I personally think it might be more profitable, especially now). I have little patience with a lot of that too, but I also know how to turn my computer off and take a walk or go to work where I can interact with real people all day. It's the same circularity and as the "anti-woke" crowd: anti-anti-psychiatry is just as stale, single-minded, myopic, and ridiculous as the caricature of what it opposes. And it's all just caricatures being traded here. I'm not one to quote Deleuze, but this is clearly a case where they need to take his advice: open a damn window! Go see other things! There's a lot of stuff in the world! A lot of people! Get off TikTok! These are grown people doing amateur sociology by reading the Times and scrolling TikTok. It's embarrassing. I would say he should try yoga or something, but that would be misunderstanding what's actually going on. He won't stop, because he's probably making $100,000s doing this little song and dance. And that's what it really comes down to. He's found a way to be morally righteous about "commodification", to have an avenue for his apparently ceaseless rage, and has commodified it, just like the right has successfully commodified being "anti-woke" by selling shirts with phrases intending to "piss off the libs" or whatever. The same algorithmic advantages that skew audiences towards Nazis and street fight videos on Twitter accrue to him: social media tends to favor the loudest, least-informed guy in the room (who has only read the headlines of the world's biggest newspaper and scrolled the world's most popular social media app) with the best and meanest insults because you can't stop reading the damn stuff. It's all one big game and we're all the losers for choosing to subject ourselves to it.
My view is that those of us who are leftists and in favor of a renewed, progressive, or revolutionary psychiatric program should stay completely out of this and not be lured into saying anything at all. I'm making a single exception right now, because I think your work and something like the Icarus Project is so far above this kind of thing, because it's actually engaged in the real world. Though I do understand why you're extending the olive branch here. My sense is that there's ultimately no "good position" vis-a-vis the public debate around this, because neither side is talking about things that actually matter. It won't bring us any closer to connection, to housing, to access to good care, to social supports, to listening to each other, to anything that makes life worth living. This type of material lures us into caring about a virtual conflict with no real life stakes. Someone like deBoer might occasionally say he thinks the severely mentally ill need access to treatment, but nothing he's ever written has convinced me he genuinely cares about that, has tried to expand that access in a material way, or is interested in an individual like Neely beyond grotesquely using him or other murdered or dead schizophrenics as props to harm his enemies. What's especially absurd about both the anti-anti-psychiatry and anti-woke people is that they seem to be angriest and most virulent precisely at the point that they begin to win what they claim they want. Freddie is outspoken about expanding forced treatment, and we are in the middle of a wave of blue states turning their backs on their attempts at alternative approaches and expanding forced treatment. But if you read his pieces, you'd think we were living in a holistic health, hippie, psychedelic, anything goes radical utopia. Someone like him would not even be satisfied by winning, because they aren't concerned with empirical reality, but with anecdotes that support the myopia, because myopic rage is actually the business model. None of the "anti-anti" crowd has anything interesting to say about material supports, because they don't really care about that. They care about getting a dunk on the "idiots," "dupes", etc same as some of the virulent anti-med crowd. That's not an affect worth indulging and cultivating as we move forward.