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What even is “mental health” these days? Apparently, it is now best defined as a teenage child turning up to school dressed as a giraffe.

You may be aware of the lamentable phenomenon of “furries,” those clearly disturbed individuals who self-identify as animals. A typical example would be this absurd and pathetic young Norwegian girl named Nano who thinks that, due to “a genetic defect,” she is a cat born in a human body, and so crawls around on all fours, communicates via purring, sleeps in a sink, dresses in fuzzy ears and paws, and claims to possess both super-hearing and the supposed ability to see in the dark. Tellingly, she has proved thus far unable to catch any mice, though, these rodents being much too fast for her actually 100 percent human senses.

You would think that, as possessing “good mental health” is one of the chief mantras of the Oprah Winfrey Health Dictatorship that now rules over us, today’s governing class would be eager to disabuse misguided little girls like Nano of their delusions—yet in our Human Zoo era of transsexual self-ID, why not have trans-species self-ID too? Online furry advocacy groups, like furscience.com, today give the genuine “mental health advice” to concerned schoolchildren that, if they are being bullied at school for being excessively tall, they might like to begin to self-ID as giraffes, thereby to take ownership of the whole situation and restore their state of innate psychological well-being.

Normal, non-mad individuals may easily perceive that telling a bullied beanpole to start turning up to school dressed as Geoffrey the Giraffe from the old Toys “R” Us adverts is more likely to cause further bullying than to end it—but no matter. These days, being psychologically normal is increasingly being redefined by identity-politics freaks as a sign of outright social insanity.

Asylum Seekers
Possessing a debilitating disorder has now been redefined as an essential identitarian fashion accessory. Which mental aberration is “in” this year? OCD? Tourette’s? Compulsive coprophagy?

Apparently, the current psychological condition du jour is autism, according to a new report from a pair of London clinicians, Anthony David, of University College, and Quinton Deeley, of King’s College, which warns that, since 1998, there has been a ninefold increase in autism diagnoses across the U.K.

Do many such new patients genuinely have autism, however, or have they just been groomed to think they have, thereby stealing away scarce medical resources from those genuine sufferers who actually need it? In recent years, just like gender, autism has been over-generously redefined not as a discrete psychological state, but as something that exists “on a spectrum”…you know, just like gender suddenly does in the eyes of leftist queer ideologues.

David and Deeley note that having a condition like autism or Asperger’s (the mild form of the ailment), or even being outright mentally ill or cognitively impaired, has been arbitrarily rebranded under the positive term “neurodiversity”—so, for example, a child who turns up to school dressed as a giraffe is just an excellent example of furry neurodiversity in action, rather than a complete nutcase who needs his or her neck snapping immediately for the good of wider normative society.

Forget “neurodiversity,” the authors suggest this trend should perhaps in fact be rechristened “neurophilia.”

Analyze This
There are plenty of apps out there nowadays that allow people to (mis)diagnose themselves with autism very easily, the doctors observe, the condition being defined loosely anew as a mere constellation of common generic behavioral traits—not enjoying social situations, for instance, finding small talk difficult, or enjoying regular, clockwork routines. In the past, such qualities would merely have been termed “being a bit awkward,” but no longer.

Now all kinds of celebrities have self-diagnosed themselves as autistic via an app store, and millions of proles are minded, lemming-like, to follow suit: It is estimated 700,000 adults in the U.K., and 5.4 million in the U.S., now enjoy an autism diagnosis, official or otherwise. Online “autism influencers” make money proudly broadcasting intimate awkward details of their lives to millions of strangers, coaching them that they too can have something very, very wrong with them—if only they have the courage to stand up and self-diagnose themselves so!

As with the current queer campaign to rewrite history by saying people like Churchill and Nelson were secretly gay or trans, various luminaries of the past, real and fictional, are also now being retrospectively “outed” as old-time “Auties,” too: Newton, Darwin, Mozart, Einstein, Jefferson, Tesla, Sherlock Holmes and, perhaps most notable of all, Dan Aykroyd from Ghostbusters.

Even Hitler was autistic now too, his own personal obsessive interest presumably being the limitless perfidy of the Jews. If no less an all-time high achiever than Der Führer is now revealed as having been a high-functioning autistic, then autism today must enjoy a new status of profound social cachet, not social stigma, as in primitive, prejudiced days of old. Being neurodiverse can now help you conquer all of Western Europe, after all.

Therefore, doctors are increasingly being besieged by people desperate to have their own individual personality flaws and failings—being emotionally cold and distant, say, having an abrupt and rude manner with others, or developing a disturbingly detailed aspiration to commit genocide against all known inferior races—revalidated as enjoying some sort of pseudo-clinical basis. Then, they can be automatically absolved of their sins by the new white-coat-clad priests of Oprah’s Church of Wellness™.

According to David and Deeley, patients are yelling at their doctors, “But it’s my lived experience!” putting the quacks under irresistible social pressure to conform to their own fake self-diagnoses. Thus, what we are now seeing is actually a fashionably driven boom merely in diagnoses of autism, rather than a genuine increase in the underlying genuine condition per se—an ideologically fueled social contagion, precisely like transgenderism. If autism really is now a “spectrum,” then where’s the cut-off point? Conceivably, everyone could be on it, could they not?

Head toward the comically self-validating website reframingautism.org, and learn that “there’s no right or wrong way to come to the conclusion that you’re autistic.” What, not even just flipping a coin, consulting the I Ching, haruspicating entrails, or asking a Ouija board? No, because “Any route to your self-discovery is completely valid…. However you arrive at the conclusion, you are valid, and you get to identify however you choose.” That’s the precise kind of defective logic, taken to its extreme, that sees tall kids being groomed to become giraffes.

Positively Retarded
A fascinating 2023 study of an unnamed U.K. Sixth Form college whose staff and management enjoyed a distinctly left-liberal, diversity-worshipping outlook on life demonstrates perfectly how this kind of scam works. No long-necked teens turned up there dressed as Geoffrey, but, indoctrinated day in, day out in emetic mental well-being nonsense, an exceedingly disproportionate number of students began to self-ID as being “neurodiverse”—over a quarter of adolescents on the school’s books, more than double the national average. No wonder, when the coddled kids were given immediate access to a sacred safe-space-room-cum-padded-cell named “The Sanctuary,” filled with specialist staff members “dedicated to peace” whenever they felt the need to run out of lessons if distressed by hard sums or long words in books.

Predictably, the (mental) institution in question held regular whole-school cult-indoctrination assemblies devoted to focusing upon “mental hygiene.” When I was a Sixth Former, we just used to have whole-school assemblies devoted to the Good Word of Our Lord Jesus. Jesus was better.

According to the study’s authors, the children “having” [sic] self-diagnosed conditions like autism lent them automatic social cachet as walking embodiments of “Social Justice” [also sic] in action. Therefore, “Many of the students expressed a strong desire to seek out an official label for the disability they felt they might have, which had either been self-identified through looking on the Internet…or had been ‘picked up’ by teaching staff.” They furthermore sought out ostentatiously visible neurodiverse fashion accessories like earplugs to block out allegedly distressing noise from their oh-so-oversensitive pseudo-autistic earholes—which could actually have been genuinely beneficial to their mental well-being, because then they wouldn’t have been able to hear their ridiculous teachers grooming them into a state of fake public spasticity.

When I was a schoolboy, the only time I can recall anyone wanted to pretend to be disabled was when one perfectly healthy classmate boasted of planning to “borrow” a disabled relative’s wheelchair and then use it to jump the queue for rides next time he visited Alton Towers theme park whilst sitting in it, limp-wristed and drooling. If he was lucky, he said, he might even “get a sympathy wank” from one of the more bleeding-heart park attendants in their little hut afterward. When the rest of us expressed our profound disgust at this sicko scheme, he quickly dropped it. For today’s woke-washed youth, however, pretending to be mentally and physically handicapped is now a very public expression of their purported existence upon a far higher plane of left-wing morality.

Spastic Fantastic
Revealingly, students in the college—which was rather selective in its upper-middle-class intake—also chose to self-ID not simply as Auties, but as being abnormally “clever,” at least compared to the defective untermenschen proles who attended most normal local schools. Being of such superior intellect, these child geniuses consequently also felt they “were more likely to be enlightened and tolerant of difference than other young people,” like junior NYT readers, to the extent they actually sought to be “different” (re: psychologically unwell) themselves.

The whole autism epidemic in the place sounded more like one grand, gigantic opportunity to virtue-signal more than anything else. Here is the testimony of one cretinously woke student:

“I am chairing the prom committee at the moment…and we are going to do it as a silent disco because we’re very much aware that we’ve got a high percentage of people with autism or ADHD or people who…like myself, have some sort of sensory overload, just some anxiety from too much going on.”

I didn’t like discos as a teenager either. I didn’t begin spuriously self-identifying as autistic, though, and then turning up at them anyway before self-righteously demanding everyone turn the music off, or I’d publicly shit myself in the middle of the dance floor. Perhaps there is something profoundly wrong with kids like these today, after all—the Maoist, #BeKind society around them has deliberately programmed them all to be so.

As the report’s authors put it, the college’s students “appeared able to re-make disability as a liberal intellectual identity-marker and use it as a form of [social] capital” by choosing “to position themselves in empowering ways in relation to divergence from health ‘norms.’” Do note those inverted commas there.

The skeptical parents of one self-ID-ing girl put the real truth of the matter more bluntly: “They just think it’s trendy to have a disability or be mentally ill.” At last—a voice of sanity! Those parents want to be careful. With attitudes like that, they’ll soon end up locked away in a straitjacket.