I am probably the least pop culture aware person in America, I’m honesty not the least bit interested latest sideshow antics this weeks pop culture icons. Which is why I’m loath to do this, but like most of you I’ve been subjected to a daily dose of the Charlie Sheen Saga. Franky, I don’t much care, but I do agree with Brendan O’Neill… Mr. Sheen is to be commended for standing up to the tyrannical therapy police:
Charlie Sheen is my hero. Not because he goes on five-day benders, takes binbags of drugs and cavorts with ladies of the night. That would be recklessly self-indulgent behaviour in anyone over the age of 21, never mind in a 45-year-old actor with a primetime TV job and a wife and children at home. No, he’s my hero because he refuses to allow his behaviour to be psychologised. He refuses to genuflect before the Oprahite altar of psychobabble and blame his antics on his “inner demons”. Instead he’s fighting like a terrier against experts’ attempts to brand him as “disordered” and in the process has made himself into a one-man army of resistance to the tyranny of therapy that has the twenty-first-century in its grip.
Easily the most shocking thing about the Charlie Sheen affair is not his recent debauched behaviour – Stop the press: Hollywood actor behaves hedonistically! – but rather the unstoppable march of a zombie-eyed army of therapists who want to diagnose Sheen from a distance as “mentally ill”. Every cod-psychologist in search of a headline, and increased business, is offering to write a prescription for Sheen. Under the headline “Addict or Bipolar? Examining the ‘Passion’ of Charlie Sheen”, Time magazine admits “it isn’t possible to diagnose patients at a distance”. And yet it proceeds to do precisely that, employing two experts to discuss whether Sheen is suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, bipolar mania, depression, anxiety or addiction.
While Mr. Sheen’s behavior may be boorish and self-destructive, it is, in and of itself not indicative of a mental disorder… Sometimes a hard partying, self-destructive jerk is just a hard partying, self-destructive jerk. Whatever Mr. Sheen’s failings as person are, this constant drum beat of opinions from armchair therapists isn’t helping.
Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled blogging.
[…] I said last week about Mr. Sheen’s behavior in and of itself not being indicative of a mental disorder… Forget it, it’s become increasing clear that he’s at the very least an order of […]