Mental health as a weapon in public debate

Calling your opponent mentally ill: the last resort of public debate

The conversation about a figure known as the Nini de Elda (the "NEET of Elda", a young man from a town in Alicante with a past in local politics) ends where these things usually end: personal discredit dressed up as psychiatry. He is said to be increasingly unstable, predicted to end up in court and, along the way, handed diagnoses without a medical degree. The pattern is an old one: if you cannot rebut someone, declare them incapable.

Diagnosis without a case file

The exchange mixes physical details –16 years old and 1.90 metres tall–, sensual orientation, political affiliation (with a brief stint in Vox) and even the ritual of saying his name five times in front of a mirror. All of it to support a single conclusion: that he is a dangerous lunatic. No evidence, no clinical assessment, no nuance. The comic invention is served up as proof.

Stigma as a strategy

The problem is not the occasional insult. It is that every use of a disorder as a tool of discredit reinforces the stigma for those who actually suffer from a real condition. The man in question has, according to what has been published, no diagnosis at all; but the label has already stuck. This is how mental health is emptied of meaning and turned into a wildcard for silencing inconvenient voices.

The curious thing about the episode is that nobody produces a medical report. Amid impossible mortgages, acronyms and mirrors, medicine is conspicuously absent. And with these habits, anyone can play psychiatrist. The initial question –what kind of person can write this– is answered with another: what kind of debate are we building when diagnosis replaces reasoning.