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Yes. And no. I loved the writing of Harlan Ellison, and he was responsible for one of the best ever Star Trek stories in all the series, "The City on the Edge of Forever", as well as some classic Outer Limits episodes.
But towards the end of his life, he beclowned himself, notably at the 2006 Hugos where he groped Connie Willis.
All through his career, he had (and cultivated) a reputation of being a grade-A pain in the ass, someone awkward to work with, someone who was a troublemaker - but who was worth it because he was just that damn good. And indeed, if you take the title of the Dangerous Visions anthologies, that's exactly what he thought science fiction could and should do, shake up the conventional pieties, show a different version of reality. He really, truly believed in the 60s and the counter-culture as "this is going to change everything". Of course, in the end, a lot of things stayed exactly the same despite it all. (And the delays, delays, and yet more delays and problems with the Dangerous Visions anthologies were also an example of classic Ellison).
On the other hand... we have to separate the artist and the art. This is a guy who could be a total dick, and yet then he writes a story that smacks you in the chops with its humanity. Sometimes he's screaming in justified outrage, in righteous anger, about a real wrong that should be redressed.
Yeah. And then he goes and writes a story like Croatoan which does not go where you expect it to go (he should be writing a slam-dunk pro-choice fable here, shouldn't he? but it's not. It's very differently not).
Ellison was someone who suffered in life, and who took advantage of that as an excuse for being an asshole. I was very angry with him in his later years. And then a while back I read a very sympathetic piece (possibly the foreword to the final Dangerous Visions that he edited after Ellison's death) by J.M. Straczynski about his friendship with Ellison and how he (probably, likely, definitely) had undiagnosed/untreated mental illness for a long time, and how he was declining physically and mentally in his later years and that explained a lot about Ellison for me and won back some of the sympathy he'd lost. This comes from an article about Straczynski and Ellison:
I don't understand how this makes him more likable or sympathetic. I find it odd that people treat mental illnesses as something separate from a person that isn't reflective of the "real" them. But this isn't like some parasite was controlling his brain, his mental illnesses, if they existed, were just as intrinsic to who he was as his good qualities. I don't see how this is different from me saying "I'm really a nice guy I'm just suffering from untreated assholeism"
Because while it doesn't excuse everything, it does explain behaviour. I was angry about it because I thought he was just being an asshole, just pushing to get away with things because he thought he was that special and entitled. Finding out that his brain was busted helped explain "okay, sometimes he genuinely couldn't help it/didn't realise what he was doing".
Genuine mental illness, like physical illness, does have an effect on you that no amount of willpower or grit or 'just decide to do better' will shift. Of course some people will use that as an excuse. But if you have a problem, and don't realise it's a problem, and don't get treatment for it because you're not aware of treatment, then it gets as much latitude as "I never knew I was diabetic and that's why I was always fainting and lacking energy because I wasn't eating correctly" would get someone.
If it's okay to take insulin to treat the problem, it's okay to take antidepressants. It's not about 'the real you', it's about 'this is you when you are healthy and this is you when you are not'.
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And indeed, most working class people treat 'being crazy' as a major character flaw akin to being cruel or lazy or greedy or whatever, while having some sympathy for those who are stupid or disabled. What goes into what bucket of 'how your mind works and you can't help it vs you need to fix that' varies from viewpoint to viewpoint and the progressive view that having a mental illness is an excuse for whatever awful thing and makes you sympathetic in the same way as a disabled person is is not only not universal, it is in this redneck's perspective actively harmful- people with the sorts of minor mental illnesses that could be treated if they'd take some damn responsibility are discouraged from doing so, instead they just harm others, even if minorly, with impunity.
Seriously lots of these 'mentally ill' people just need to go to church and call their mom.
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With bi-polar though for example, being on medication can literally turn you into a different person. My exes mother had bipolar and on medication she was a sweet Christian lady who baked cakes and wouldn't hurt a fly. Off it she was a foul mouthed, paranoid who lacked impulse control and used to beat her kids with metal coat hangers.
Which was the "real" her? The difference between a mental illness and just being an asshole, is an asshole can choose to not be so. With a mental illness you can't.
This should really be “With a mental illness, it is much more challenging not to.” I don’t give a lot of sympathy to people who use excuses like BPD or autism or whatever else to be a jerk.
Some people are dramatically helped by medication (see using Ritalin to make it easier to have executive function with AHDH) - the consequences of not having executive function should not be inflicted on others. If you struggle to remember to (for example) bring both children to school, then put a note on the doorknob, or the coffee machine, or wherever else you will definitely look. Too often, I see people who claim (for example) that they have to make a mess for their partner to clean up, but somehow the negative consequences of their actions never seem to land on themselves.
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All of this below is somewhat moot in the sense that I'm not convinced that Ellison had Bipolar.
Disturbances in cognition exist on a spectrum from "this is not recognized pathology and is just my personality structure" (like a preference for scrambled eggs, a love of baseball, or being an asshole to your girlfriend because you are insecure about your small dick) to "this is purely something with an organic cause and blaming the person for their behavior is asinine" (a classic example benign example is a granny who is violent in the hospital because she's delirious and thinks she's is in a Nazi camp because of a UTI, a classic scarier example is someone who engages in a mass shooting because they have a golf ball sized tumor pressing on a few key structures in their brain).
Cases of the former are much more legitimate to blame (whatever that means) if love of eggs cause problems. Realistically insecurity about the small dick requires some sort of sex therapy or something if the person wants to stop hurting others and have a bit better of an experience of life.
Murder granny gets put in restraints and we treat her UTI and then everyone goes about their business and forgives her afterwards.
When it comes to things in the middle of those two extremes (that is, classic mental illness) we have a similar range. On one end you have personality disorders, like borderline personality disorder. These are in truth diseases of personality construction and really tease at what a "disease" is. It's easy to not feel bad for them (although I encourage you to) and this is true to the point where people don't want to give the diagnosis because of stigma (they give bipolar instead, relevance to Ellison?).
At the other end is one of: schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and bipolar disorder. You could debate which one and they are certainly interesting and have interesting impacts on how much sympathy and guilt we should feel (what do you mean a symptom of the disease is that he doesn't think he has a disease and that's why he doesn't take medication and then ends up hurting people?),
True Bipolar 1 with psychotic features is the most stark here. Again I doubt Ellison had this but this the most sympathy you can have. This is a person with a monster inside them that comes up abruptly and severely because they run a 5k and their metabolism of their lithium changes.
They go from total normal nice person to a violent felon who doesn't sleep, spends their entire family's money and does X,Y, and Z ends up in jail with HIV and then gets started on medication and then goes completely back to normal.
Some people do things that put them at higher rate of an episode, but many people commit no mistakes and still lose.
Living with that should increase sympathy, no?
Most people aren't as stark as the straw patient above, but that is what it can be like.
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