Irony: Matt Yglesias accuses the left of mental illness

Does he really want the public to read his politics through the lens of psychological health?

It would have been so easy to Photoshop him into a straitjacket.PHOTO CREDIT: kellywritershouse. Licensed under Creative Commons 2.0.

Matt Yglesias, last evening:

I just sincerely think that the starting point for analysis of every instance of “why are leftists acting insane about [specific topic X]” has to start with the realization that they have dramatically higher baseline levels of mental illness.

There is of course no real evidence that leftists have a dramatically higher baseline level of mental illness. As I wrote back in March, the body of work Matty is relying on here relies on all kinds of extremely serious problems of methodology and formulation that completely compromise their integrity.

But what’s really striking to me about this quote is that Matty himself has disclosed that he has suffered from serious mental illness:

I have at times in my life struggled seriously with depression. I’ve been on antidepressants, I’ve tried trans-cranial magnetic stimulation, I’ve seen therapists. I also, separately, did therapy for anger management.

So if we take Matty’s comment seriously, should we not also read everything he says through the lens of mental illness? Including, for example, the claim that he has “been feeling good for the past few years”? Because this is something that people with serious mental illness often say — until their therapist finds out that they have in fact been doing quite badly, and are in need of serious intervention.