rant · moment 5 of 19
Destigmatizing People Who Don't Want to Kill Themselves
from #254 - Apocalypse Olympics with Abby Martin | The Tim Dillon Show · #254
6 min
Riffing off the mental health angle in the Olympics stories, Tim argues society over-focuses on destigmatizing anxiety and depression while ignoring real severe mental illness like his mother's schizophrenia, and jokes about people fetishizing diagnoses from Instagram.
- Tim's pitch: can we destigmatize people who don't want to kill themselves?
- Everything now is about destigmatizing mental health, but they mostly talk about anxiety and depression, not serious illnesses like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
- People are self-diagnosing mental illness off Instagram and fetishizing it as their identity rather than understanding what they actually have.
- Tim has a mother with real, serious mental illness — not the kind that gets profiled in Rolling Stone or turned into content for young kids.
- Reading his mother's suicidal ideation over Olympic-style inspirational music: she considered driving off a road, drowning, or shooting herself every single day.
- Then she discovered pole vaulting and that changed her life.
- A boy whose parents raped him and sold him to pedophiles found redemption through running and hurdling, and later reconnected with his sister.
- His sister also raped him, which somehow gave him the strength to pursue his Olympic dreams.
- A young woman raised as a Nazi in suburban Georgia who posted in neo-Nazi gaming communities eventually became a swimmer at the Tokyo games.
- The Olympics this year will feature an ex-Nazi competing against a person whose parents repeatedly raped them — it's going to be horror beyond human comprehension.