Mental Illness Isn’t Pretty, and We Shouldn’t Expect It To Be
Matty and Azealia's Twitter beef, the validation paradox in mental health discourse, “crashing out,” and what’s next for The 1975.
It’s really difficult to have a nuanced take when volatile situations like this one happen. The situation I’m referring to, as you probably already know, happened two days ago as of the time I’m writing this, when washed-up rapper and known narcissist bigot Azealia Banks made violent threats and disgusting comments towards Matty Healy, his partner Gabbriette, and Charli xcx. Azealia proceeded to melt down when Matty posted a series of angry responses matching her energy to both her and another Twitter user who said something awful about Gabbriette. Matty then backtracked and apologized to Azealia multiple times, both publicly and privately, for lashing out, and has since deactivated his Twitter account.
That’s an extremely simplified version of events, but I honestly do not have the energy or desire to repeat any of the words that were said (and are still being said, for the second day straight, by Azealia). If you want to know the gritty details, look them up at your own detriment. But despite the fact that I’m paring this situation down to its most basic elements for time’s sake, I really hope, and am sincerely trying, to offer up a blanched, nuanced, and sincere perspective on all of it.
Why bother, you ask? Why even write this? Because I love The 1975 and enjoy thinking critically about the world around me, including people I love and respect dearly. Matty’s recent Reddit post, debriefing the situation and offering some much-needed reassurance to fans, also prompted me to write about all of this. Here’s what he said:
The phrase that keeps coming to back to me, which Matty actually alludes to in this post, is this:
Mental illness is an explanation for behavior, not an excuse.
That’s a core tenet I think everyone should keep in mind while talking about mental illness in the era of cancellations and PC culture. Unfortunately though, all too many people have trouble differentiating between those concepts and understanding the idea of validation versus enablement. I’ll admit — even after going through many years of therapy, I still struggle to tell the difference and weigh the moral outcomes of certain behaviors in certain situations. It’s a hard thing to do, because as we’ve just seen, mental illness is messy. It doesn’t come presented to us in a box wrapped with a perfect bow. It’s not straightforward, clean cut, or decisive in its morality. It’s not pretty to look at, or easy to witness.
I know this from personal experience. I’ve been through many dark periods in my life, but one of the worst happened in 2017. I was struggling with major untreated depression and anxiety, but I was completely unaware of that at the time. I had no idea why I felt so horrible most days. That summer, I went on a vacation to Canada with my family to visit a couple of the national parks. The pictures I have on my phone are beautiful, and if they were all you had to go on, you’d assume the whole thing was a happy, roaring success.
But the reality was, in between a smattering of peaceful moments, I was an absolute nightmare for my family to be around. I snapped at nearly everything anyone said to me. I took every careless comment as a personal attack. I was horribly insecure about my body and appearance, to the point where I would degrade myself out loud in front of my family, ranting about how much I hated myself and how I knew all of them must hate me too.
At a few of the big lookout points on the trails we hiked, I made my sister take a million pictures of me. I demanded she show me all of them, nearly breaking down and bursting into tears when she offered my phone back to me and I got a glimpse of the images. I then insisted she take a million more. None of them seemed to be good enough — all I could do was panic and yell at my sister for “making me look fat” in the photos. The arguing was nearly constant, and our car rides to the various destinations on our itinerary were unbearable. It seemed like at any given time, someone was either yelling, on the verge of tears, making threats, or giving the silent treatment. And most of the time that person was me. I wouldn’t say I ruined the trip, but I came very, very close.
The point of this anecdote is to illustrate how what just happened with Matty happens all the time to regular people, as I’m sure you know. The only difference — and it's a big difference — is that he’s famous, and the majority of people aren’t. I didn’t have PopBase reporting on every horrible thing I spat at my sister, but if I did, I surely wouldn’t have been able to handle it. Everything I said and did on that trip was the result of my poorly-managed mental illness, and it caused major issues for everyone around me. Similar to Matty’s impulsive urges to act on all of his very valid feelings, my open hatred of myself and intense irritability were unproductive actions I took as a result of my valid emotions.
All of my horrible, painful feelings were real and came from a genuine place of being incredibly sick, but none of the thoughts that manifested into tearful thought spirals, yelling matches, breakdowns, or silent treatments were true in the slightest. Nothing — not a single cruel word I said or action I took — was actually going to change anything about my situation or the source of my problems. Matty’s anger about online hate and his violent urges towards a woman (one who literally threatened his life and made fun of his addiction countless times, mind you) were 100% valid, but I’d argue that the actions that came from those emotions weren’t wise or very rational. Like my situation, they were never actually going to lead him anywhere closer to his ultimate desire of protecting his partner and friends from the harsh gaze of the internet.
That dialectic — the validation of real, true emotions with the simultaneous accountability required to deal with the messy actions that come from those emotions — is one of the most misunderstood concepts in modern mental health discourse, I think. It’s possible to have empathy for someone who is clearly struggling, while still acknowledging that, yes, while certain reactions might feel morally warranted by an extremely painful, difficult, and emotionally charged situation, that doesn’t mean the material effects and harm caused are any less real or more excusable.
This gets to the idea of not “validating the invalid,” but rather considering coexisting realities where you can acknowledge and validate people’s emotions and reasoning behind doing things (whether irrational or rational) without actually condoning a behavior that caused harm, whether intentional or not.
Here’s a list of statements I can personally identify within the dialectic of the recent Twitter conflict between Matty and Azealia:
Azealia Banks is one of the most horrible, reprehensible human beings on this Earth and she deserves to be held fully accountable for the litany of disgusting trauma she’s inflicted upon the world.
Azealia’s long resume of evils doesn’t absolve the people around her from accountability for their mistakes and bad decisions, no matter how small or large they seem compared to hers.
Matty’s feelings are valid, and like anyone, he has the right to stand up for the people he loves, and the right to be emotionally distressed if any harm comes to them.
It’s very common to make violent jokes and statements on the internet when strong emotions are involved, and I myself do it constantly with the likes of Elon Musk and Ted Cruz — two people who evoke extremely strong feelings of hatred and anger in me.
The consequences are not the same for everyone who uses that kind of rhetoric online, and the fact that Matty is a public figure with a large following means his actions and their consequences are amplified far more than the average person’s — making the fallout from them an actual possibility and material concern.
Matty’s actions, though spawned from very valid and justified emotions, didn’t come from a wise or rational place, and ultimately did more harm than good when it came to achieving the outcome he desired in the first place (less online hate towards the people he loves).
For fans of Matty and The 1975, it’s incredibly unfair and frustrating that Swifties and the general public took the side of one of the worst people alive simply so they could further pile more hate on Matty, and for that reason alone, threatening violence feels like something completely appropriate and justified, especially considering Azealia’s long history of threats and actual physical violence she’s never been held accountable for.
In other words — all of these occurrences and feelings can be true at once. I might be missing a few other valid viewpoints in there, but these are the most important ones I gathered from my perspective.
At this point, I feel like I’ve heard every side of this debate. Some people think Matty’s actions were the absolute right path to take in that situation, and believe he should be able to do whatever he wants considering the amount of hate and vitriol he’s received over the past year and a half. Why is Azealia allowed to constantly rag on her long list of enemies and Matty isn’t? When is he allowed to be offended?
Others want him to be held accountable for what he said, and are tired of his fans “babying a 35-year-old man” by “being too concerned for the wellbeing of someone they don’t know” and “making excuses” for words that were clearly inappropriate in their eyes.
I’ve seen many fans who are deeply concerned for Matty’s mental health, and still others that don’t really care, and are more concerned with the racial undertones of one of his tweets to Azealia and the fact that he threatened to “batter” a random person in their DMs. But what about his apologies, all of which were thoughtful and sincere? Do they absolve him of any wrongdoing? Some say yes. But are apologies still secondary to the importance of harm caused, or even a sign of weakness? I’ve seen many people agree with the latter statement, even going as far as to say that if Matty was planning to match Azealia’s energy, he should have fully committed and gone out fighting with no remorse or deleted tweets in sight.
All of these takes are extremes to some degree, as most opinions on the internet are. They leave very little room for nuance, and try to package up a messy, explosive, morally complex situation into that box I mentioned earlier, the one with the straight sides and sharp edges, held tightly shut with a pretty bow.
But like I said earlier, mental illness isn’t pretty. Never has been, never will be. So when we talk about someone “crashing out” on social media, there’s very rarely any consideration for the actual cause of those impulsive, increasingly extreme actions, because society likes to think of the “normalized” mental illnesses like depression, anxiety, addiction, and ADHD as conditions that mostly live inside of our heads, and have very few outward manifestations. Oh no, it’s only the people with stigmatized disorders that act “crazy.” Right? This can’t be the work of ADHD! What are you talking about? What else could it be but a simple case of a shitty person having a self-centered meltdown? That has to be it.
We love to frolic around and revel in the chaos of someone losing their mind a bit, and maybe due to the general lack of empathy these days, we often feel surprised that any of the drama could be happening for a reason we ourselves haven’t identified yet. That cliche of “you never know what someone is going through” is true most of the time, it turns out. But whenever we witness a public spectacle such as this one, the standard assumption is that the person is acting crazy for some amorphous reason, usually having to do with how people judge their inherent goodness of character from a distance.
The causes — the entire surrounding context of a situation and the vulnerability factors of the players involved — become this unknown variable people glaze over in conversations about what led someone to humiliating themselves and “crashing out” in front of the entire world — or the internet, in this case. This dismissal is just another way we tend to simplify what mental illness looks like in practice and in the real world, consciously or not.
The complicated reasons people do things seem, for the average Twitter user at least, to be the least interesting part of the conversation. Casual consumers never seem to get that curious about what might have led a person to do something — it’s solely the action they want to engage with, because if you remove the context, it’s very easy to simplify an issue that initially might have been difficult for you to understand. And nobody has any time for anything anymore, so why would we waste it pondering the complex dynamics of a situation when we could just slap a moral label of “good” or “bad” on it and move on to the next Twitter fight?
I’ve fallen victim to this trap within this very discourse. I recently tweeted:
“why did matty send that dm bro… did he learn nothing from the past 2 years? what happened to ‘now i’m watching what I say’ ??”
And ultimately, even though I still stand by my opinion that Matty further lashing out to a random person in their DMs wasn’t a wise decision or a productive use of his influence or time, I regret asking those questions in that tweet simply because I refused to do any thinking for myself about the possible answers. I, like so many other people on Twitter, wrote something out and pressed send within a minute of seeing the breaking news on PopBase (I hate that I just typed those words out) about Matty’s DM. My post was nothing more than a moment of shock and disbelief. I didn’t think about the answers to those questions because I didn’t actually want to know them. It was more of a rhetorical exercise than anything.
What’s striking to me is that in my shock, I didn’t even think to properly sit down and consider the fact that I know Matty is on a continuous recovery journey for his addiction and mental health issues — as many of us, including myself, are on too — and how that might affect his current state of mind. My tweet feels quite hollow now, because the answer — offered up by Matty himself in his Reddit post — is very straightforward, ironically. His ongoing struggles contributed to his impulsive behavior, and Twitter further enabled those impulses.
It’s not an excuse, as Matty said, and there’s definitely a lot of detail concerning his mental health behind that answer that we’ll never know — and never should know, to be very clear. But Matty’s explanation proves after the fact that no, he didn’t maliciously enter into this exchange because of some devastating moral failing on his part. This whole thing fell into place for a lot of reasons, most of them floating around in the vast, shadowy moral grey area where our psyches tend to take root.
It’s very easy to jump into that reactionary state; the one you cling to without even taking the chance to consider other possibilities or gather more information. But doing the opposite of that won’t necessarily excuse anyone’s actions or erase the harm they caused — don’t get me wrong. Thinking critically in of itself isn’t a solution. But it will offer up a more nuanced, empathetic perspective on conflict, and that’s something the internet is in very short supply of these days.
For as much strife, worry, embarrassment, and sadness this Twitter beef situation caused me as a fan of The 1975, I have to admit that the last part of Matty’s reddit post made me feel the most at peace I’ve been in over a year with this band and Matty as an artist. I’ve written a lot about my disdain for the performance art elements of their most recent tour, which I understand was the entire point. But to hear Matty say that he too is over that shtick and ready to move on to a happier, lighter, more loving place in his artistic evolution filled me with a deep sense of validation and gratitude.
The words “I want this 1975 world to be dreamy and wonderful again. Not some black mirror episode about being a fucking hipster” are music to my ears and make me happier and more relieved than I can even explain. In some ways I feel guilty for feeling happy, because the last two days have frankly been horrid and incredibly sad to witness. And despite the protestations of the parasocialism police, I do feel empathetic towards Matty and am somewhat concerned about his mental health struggles right now, mainly because I’ve been caught in a similar cycle of behavior to his, and I know just how bad things can really get. I also care about him because he’s one of my favorite artists, and I think that’s an okay thing to do.
But underneath that sadness and concern, I really am thrilled to realize that Matty and I agree on all of his points. I can’t wait to see what’s next for The 1975 in this dreamy, wonderful, chic new version of the band he wants us to experience with their forthcoming album. I don’t know how soon the time for that music will come, but I do know that my knowledge that Matty left Twitter for his own wellbeing and is committing to a new positive artistic vision will tide me over in the meantime.
I love The 1975 and I love Matty Healy, even when he fucks up and I vehemently disagree with him. Real love should leave space for those things to exist — not shut them out with blind worship. I still wish none of this had ever happened, but I’m at a point in my life where I can accept that many things can be true at once. Mental illness is messy, problematic, and often leads people into bad situations where it’s easy to unintentionally inflict harm on others. But it’s also a real thing affecting the brain chemistry of real people who are suffering greatly because of it, and they are completely valid in feeling all of those emotions.
The sooner we can hold both of those ideas in our head at the same time, the sooner we’ll be able to move past this discourse into the new, dreamy, wonderful world of The 1975.