Freddie deBoer’s new book takes aim at psychiatry and disability culture
Writer Freddie deBoer argues in his new book All in Your Head that disability has become a fashionable identity, and that the most severely ill have been left behind as the loudest voices come from the least afflicted.
Writer Freddie deBoer has published a book that takes aim at what he sees as the growing use of psychiatric diagnoses and trauma language as personal identity. The book, All in Your Head: Illness as Identity, Trauma as Fashion, and the Desire to be Disordered, comes out October 27 from Simon & Schuster. In it, deBoer attacks the anti-psychiatry movement, trauma culture and the casual use of disability and diagnosis labels, while tracing how deinstitutionalization left the most severely ill to homelessness and jail.
The project grew out of a conversation deBoer had with three mothers while recording a podcast. The women told him they had spent years keeping their adult children, all with severe schizophrenia, alive and out of institutions. He said he spent about two hours with them, and what stayed with him was their exhaustion. They told him they were thankful for his controversial statements because, as they put it, « we’re not allowed to weigh in on this stuff. » deBoer said the conversation offended him deeply. It led to a 2022 essay, « The Gentrification of Disability, » which became the basis for the book.
deBoer has a personal stake in the subject. He has bipolar disorder and was first hospitalized for a psychotic episode in 2002, as he has written and spoken about often. In August 2017, after stopping his medication, he had what was diagnosed as an acute psychotic episode due to bipolar mania. During that episode he made a false public accusation against another writer and harassed people online. In a 2021 Substack post, he wrote that his false accusation was a terrible crime against that writer, and he insisted his illness did not excuse his conduct: « I am responsible. » He told Fortune he sees himself as part of the gentry he criticizes in the book, because he has a mental illness and has been through the system.
The episode carried a professional cost. He was teaching at Brooklyn College, and he said his relationship with the school and his supervisors was never the same. He left in 2020. He also deleted his social media accounts and largely stopped freelancing, and his income ultimately dropped by more than a third. He has since rebuilt his career through his newsletter and through books, including The Cult of Smart, published in 2020.
The central argument of the book is that disability as a medical condition and disability as an identity have become decoupled. deBoer uses a gentrification metaphor: disability used to be the poor part of town, and then « a new kind of person has moved in, more privileged, less burdened, becoming the loudest residents. » He points to an affluent, educated person with anxiety and depression who blogs about mental illness, while, as he writes, « catatonic schizophrenics do not make TikToks. » He said the parents and relatives of people with severe autism are likely to embrace his argument, because they feel silenced and disrespected by the neurodiversity movement. He predicted that mainstream liberals will mostly oppose the book, while right-leaning dissidents and some on the left will support it.
deBoer also criticizes the growing tendency to explain psychiatric conditions as the product of a single traumatic event. He argues that the assumption is not only wrong but offensive in light of strong evidence of genetic influence on many psychiatric conditions, and that it shapes treatment. He notes that PTSD once described soldiers recovering from firefights or survivors of torture, while people now go online to say they experienced trauma when they did not get into a particular college. He describes trauma as becoming a meaningless concept even as people want it to carry consequences.
The author also points to elite colleges, citing a December 2025 Atlantic analysis that found more than 20 percent of undergraduates at Harvard and Brown are registered as disabled. He says this makes a mockery of actual disability, and that administrators know the approach is unsustainable but simply tell staff not to get sued. « Disabilities are things that decent people know not to make fun of, » deBoer said. He framed his book as an effort to talk about why the current trend is destructive.
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