What is Wrong With Mark Dorsett?

Well let me start by explaining why I wanted to write a book with characters who are so difficult to like. Obviously I was aware of the fact that the two MCs were going to be difficult to like ... I mean, the title of the book is I'm The Guy You Hate. Come on.

But in our genre there are a number of books with what I like to call "strawman plotlines" and I find those books and the culture that develops when they overrun a genre way more offensive than a few unlikable characters.

A strawman plotline is like a strawman argument: it's a plotline where the primary antagonist is portrayed in a way that no reader could ever sympathize with. It's more complicated than a cardboard "evil villain" because the point of a strawman plotline is not just bad character development. Strawman plotlines hand the reader something the reader wants to believe about themselves and their attitudes, then creates false scenarios of injustice that do not reflect the proper context and motivations of the real life injustices they are pretending to speak out against. The reader takes comfort in their moral outrage and feels proud of themselves for being a great person, part of a righteous cause ... even if in real life that reader's ACTUAL attitudes and behaviors contribute to the problems they claim to be so totally and 100% against.

It would have been easy to write a book in which the people torturing Mark Dorsett for being mentally ill were awful people, where the reader could tell themselves that if they encountered a Mark Dorsett in real life they would of course be on the right side. They would save him. They wouldn't bully him deeper and deeper into madness the way many of the characters in I'm The Guy You Hate do.

But that story would also be pathetically insincere. It was important to me that readers be able to sympathize with the "bad guys" in this situation, that they understood why people hate Mark and why they go out of their way to do such unbelievably cruel things to him.

One of the main themes of I'm The Guy You Hate is bullying, which has become the topic de jour with which to express fake and meaningless moral outrage. I really hate the dogpile of so called "anti-bullying" campaigns because most of them completely miss the fucking point. Our bullying problems can be traced directly back to the narratives we start force feeding our children with from birth. Rent basically ANY children's movie and watch what happens to "the bad guy" by the end. It is not enough to simply defeat the bad guy. It's not enough to prevent his evil plan. Without fail the bad guy is almost always humiliated publicly. He is taken down a few pegs or exposed in a way that the audience is encouraged to laugh at.

In the book, Jonny Ordell traces the problem with this narrative like this:

“Bullies don’t need a reason, Jonny.”

“See… I don’t think so. I think ... and this is just my observation, it’s all a cycle really. We have this narrative: revenge of the nerds, right? The uncool kids take revenge on the cool kids, humble them. We all indulge in their humiliation because we have an excuse: it’s righteous. They are bad people being punished—they are bullies—but people can be so insecure sometimes. So how do we know that the slights, the ostracism aren’t just imagined? What if the cool kid never really rejects the uncool kid? What if the uncool kid just assumes the cool kid will never, could never, really like him? Assumes he’s being rejected when really nothing of the kind has happened.”

We teach people that the correct way of dealing with people who make them feel bad is to find ways to publicly humiliate them and then we wonder why we have a bullying problem? Really?

I hate anti-bullying campaigns for the same reason I hate strawman plotlines: it's self congratulatory bullshit that gives people something EASY to agree with so that they don't have to take a cold hard look at THEIR OWN FUCKING BEHAVIOR.

But what does this have to do with mental illness?

The reason why Mark gets bullied is because most people do not realize he is mentally ill. Stories like Mark's play out everyday, we just don't usually see them from the inside. We usually hear about them after Mark has committed suicide, then we flash our fake outrage and a half a dozen completely meaningless blog posts are written urging people to "get help" if they need it. We act like if we had been there, if this had been our friend OF COURSE we would have done the right thing.

I'm The Guy You Hate was designed to be a book that threw acid in the face of this idea. You would not do the right thing. You would absolutely not do the right thing. Especially if you happened to care about the person in trouble.

As much as Jonny Ordell wants to do the right thing, he ends up enabling Mark, making many of the situations in which he is trying to protect Mark much worse. He allows the situation with Mark to completely and totally destroy his self esteem and does not recognize his own resentment until he is actively participating in the bullying he is supposedly trying to stop. That's not a pretty story, but it is an HONEST story.

I made a decision while I was writing this book not to reveal the name of Mark's illness because it seemed counterproductive to do so. To begin with, though Mark's behavior was drawn not just from my personal experience but from the stories of hundreds of people I interacted with in support groups and on online crisis forums, I did not wish Mark's characterization to be treated as a representation of his disease. Mental illness manifests differently for everyone. Even the exact same disorder can look one way in one case, and a completely different way with another person.

Naming the disease would also be overlooking the actual problem that fuels the tragedy playing out in the book: people do not recognize mental illness when they see it because we only accept a few, extremely narrow depictions of mental illness in our stories. When depression doesn't look like what we've decided depression should look like we question whether or not the person should just "get over it". When autism doesn't look like what we've decided it should, we decide that an austic person is not a person at all. When OCD doesn't look like what we've decided... well you get the point.

Adding one more name to the list of acceptable mental illness isn't going to solve anything. I can't help but feel that the main reason people want to know specifically what's wrong with Mark Dorsett is because they want to pull up the Wikipedia and start figuring out which behaviors he should be forgiven for and which behaviors he should be punished and humiliated for.

But maybe I'm wrong, maybe people are just sincerely curious. So, okay, Mark Dorsett is suffering from what's called a Cluster B Personality Disorder. Depending on the doctor he could either be diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder or Narcissistic Personality Disorder (over the years research has suggested that there's a significant gender bias in the diagnostic procedure, that BPD is not any more or less common in women just that doctors are more likely to interpret the same behaviors and thought patterns differently in men and women).

Borderline Personality Disorder is a pretty heartbreaking mental illness, a lot of therapists still refuse to treat patients diagnosed with this. It is brought on by a severe childhood trauma-- most likely sexual abuse, but not always-- and best responds to a complex and expensive form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

Even among professionals who should know better, people with BPD are not afforded much compassion. They are seen as compulsive liars, manipulative, pathetic, selfish. If their self-loathing, self-destructive patterns cross over to self-injurious behavior they can open up some pretty Exorcist level stuff:

Marsha Linehan arrived at the Institute of Living on March 9, 1961, at age 17, and quickly became the sole occupant of the seclusion room on the unit known as Thompson Two, for the most severely ill patients. The staff saw no alternative: The girl attacked herself habitually, burning her wrists with cigarettes, slashing her arms, her legs, her midsection, using any sharp object she could get her hands on.

The seclusion room, a small cell with a bed, a chair and a tiny, barred window, had no such weapon. Yet her urge to die only deepened. So she did the only thing that made any sense to her at the time: banged her head against the wall and, later, the floor. Hard.

(Source)

Marsha Lineham went on to develop a key component in the treatment of Cluster B Personality disorders called "Radical Acceptance" she then devoted her life and education to studying and helping those like her, becoming the foremost expert in BPD. She only recently came out as a former patient, shocking many of her colleagues.

The irony of BPD is that because it is not linked back to a chemical or neurological cause, people with BPD ... even the WORST cases of BPD can recover and live perfectly normal, unmedicated lives. If they stay in "remission" for three years, the odds of them relapsing drop astronomically.

And that's the most heartbreaking thing about this type of mental illness: recovery is so close and so attainable but many people dealing with this illness cannot reach it simply because their actions are not recognized as mental illness by the general public. So for every one person who understands that this person needs help, there are five people who will be baited into encouraging the self-destruction along. For ever loved one who draws a line in the sand and stops enabling, there's a queue of lonely guys and girls convinced that the cure is enough love and support.

It's a really sad, frustrating and horrible thing to watch play out and what I felt was important to understand about it is that mental illness like this is not about one person being "sick". It's about how the illness affects an entire community of people, worsening or reenforcing the disorder. So that's what I really wanted to write about: how mental illness isolates, damages, and ultimately changes the people that surround it. How not recognizing what's really going on or not knowing how to deal with it can turn you into a person you hate.

Hence the title.