Masks Mirror Mental Illness
Ending Mandates Will Not Make Us Well
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I recently returned from a five-day trip to Colorado, where I attended a conference for 700 people. From beginning to end, I never saw even one person there wearing a mask—not one. I also found all the attendees to be exceptionally welcoming, friendly, and curious. They expressed a sincere interest in learning and sharing. They wanted to develop themselves intellectually, and they sought out others to build new relationships based on shared values.
In contrast, back here in Los Angeles, where I live and work, everyone is still wearing masks indoors. Approximately 80% of Los Angelenos still wear face-diapers while outside, even while driving alone in their car or riding their bicycle to work. As I left a gym today, I overheard a masked woman at the check-in desk say to the girl behind the counter, “I really like your mask!” I froze in place as I let the words sink in. They nauseated me. This woman was making a fashion comment about a medical device forced upon a worker whom I know personally, someone who despises being forced to cover her face. I would have felt the same way if I had heard her say, “I really like your handcuffs.” I turned to the woman and said, “I really like her face. Unfortunately, she isn’t allowed to show it to people anymore.” On my way to the car, I considered what I had just witnessed: the display of a sick, perverse fetish over a dirty and dehumanizing practice that assaults our most fundamental social expression—showing our faces to one another.
I considered the distinctions in character and personality between the group I had attended the conference with and those who live in Los Angeles. Nearly universally, I found the maskless conference attendees to be courageous, mature, wise, kind, generous, and principled. Mask-wearing residents of my hometown, on the other hand, appear largely cowardly, callous, naïve, narcissistic, and emotionally immature. I began to wonder if the latter group of universal maskers has always been this way but was simply better at hiding it, until they all adopted face-diapers as their social insignia. For many years, I have felt a degree of unease in my interactions with locals in Los Angeles. Most conversations are superficial here, though, so very little of a person’s unique qualities is ever revealed through casual encounters.
When I evaluate a patient in my practice, it is largely through an in-depth and lengthy conversation—a clinical assessment—that I am able to determine the presence and severity of a mental illness. Unlike a social chat, during a psychiatric assessment no question is off-limits. In order to properly diagnose and treat someone who is suffering from an emotional or mental disability, I need to know what is hidden. Patients come for help, so they are nearly always willing to share their secrets with me in exchange for a sincere effort on my part to understand them and offer a treatment that might alleviate their suffering. Often, there is shame or embarrassment involved in doing that. There is also a reward—feeling better.
With the advent of the mask craze, mental illness is no longer invisible in the public space. What was once reserved for only a psychiatrist’s ears is now on flagrant display to any citizen with eyes to see it. When I see a man jog past me with a piece of cloth tied around his nose and mouth, I don’t need to speak to him to know that he is mentally ill. When I see a woman sunbathing in the park in a two-piece bikini with a diaper lying on her face, no conversation is necessary—she is sick. To learn this is both disheartening and liberating. As I discover that 80% of the people who inhabit my city are mentally unwell, I feel sad. With that discovery comes a new freedom, though, to efficiently filter out those with limited functioning, so that I no longer waste time or suffer frustration over failed expectations of normalcy with those who simply lack that fundamental capacity to be normal. This has been a reality check, but, as I often say, to live an honest and healthy life, we must live in reality.
The mask mandates will soon end. The cowardly yet otherwise emotionally healthy will then largely abandon the despicable “face-coverings.” Others will not, at least not at first. Some may never leave their homes without them. Regardless, the mental illness and character flaws that drove this sick practice will remain. I often speak and write about the damage that masks have wrought on society, but they have also revealed a fundamental decay in the psychological health of Americans, especially those living in cities. Let’s not pretend that by tossing the masks in the garbage—where they belong—we will be solving the problem. As much as masks drive a degradation of individual social interaction and of society at large, they also serve as a visible reminder of pre-existing mental illness that we must begin to address. The end of the mandates is only the beginning of the road to recovery.
Mark McDonald, M.D.
Psychiatrist and author of United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis
Your last line is so powerful. I have felt since the very start of the new virus hysteria that we would be in a mental crisis. I just spent the last 2 weeks helping my daughter move to Florida from Seattle for a new job. She is a therapist for at risk kids/families. In Seattle she was forced to counsel these families who were in crisis with a mask on her face and masks on theirs. it was devastating. As much as she loved working with these families, she finally had to leave. I have basically left Seattle as well because more than 75% of children that i see in public are masked. It is horrific. Even educators that I know who don't like the practice tell me that they "don't want to make waves". To me it's so clearly child abuse and I am floored at how many people that I thought were compassionate are going along with this. I am currently in Arizona a my "freedom house' where it is MOSTLY sane. However, last night we attended an outdoor festival where there was a group of young Girl Scouts selling cookies. The little girls were the only masked people there. It was so sad and I told the adult there that I would love to buy cookies from smiling faces but I would have to pass today. She just shrugged. Thank you SO much for focusing on this massive societal issue! I agree this is not over yet. We must scream from the rooftops. NEVER AGAIN.
I agree that masking children is child abuse, and masks all day to be allowed to work are cruel and unhealthy .. and masking outdoors is absolutely absurd - even if a mask gave substantial protection in any direction, when the effective area is literally infinite, there's nothing to protect from. It's heartbreaking to see so many masks outdoors, and on children (in NYC). Yet when I ride the subway / bus, I put on an N95. Not out of blind compliance with authorities I don't trust, but because I'm weighing various factors, and even tho I'm less sure it does anything protective, even on the chance it does, the factors of density, duration, draft, dimensions (and personal health and elderly parents), point to even a slight protection being worth it.
When people cough on the train, I feel better that I have that mask on. I take it off the second I get outside. There is some ambiguity even among the doctors who know the official narrative is bullshit as to if masks can be useful sometimes, or are completely ineffective. Dr Meryl Nass says N95s do something, if fitted right, while cloth / surgical masks don't do anything. The many studies in a long Brownstone article on masks have mixed results for N95s. Dr. Pierre Kory points out that mask studies often don't differentiate for type of space, and in some indoor spaces they could be useful.
Online I've seen a lot of derision for people who wear masks. But - believe it or not - it's possible to wear masks (indoors), and also understand the factors of deception and control and abuse that are happening. I have treatments at home in case I get covid, but I still really don't want that lab created virus.
I also understand that even tho I find it simple enough to wear a mask for a half hour train ride or store trip, that cannot map onto someone else's experience of masking, especially not for long periods of time - and expecting people to basically live / go to school in masks is horrible.
I might be wrong that an N95 does something, it might not do anything at all .. and seeing how little to no credible evidence there is for most masks to do anything, and how much control they are taking, as if we are cattle, I understand better that those who refuse masks even briefly are coming from a solid place of refusing to comply.
But do masks automatically equal being delusional? Perhaps depends on the situation ...?