It's not mental illness, Kanye is just an asshole...

[Ms. Toad]

38. It matters because if we had adequate health care and treatment

for people with bipolar disease, many of them would not act like jerks (and all of the other characteristics that are driven by the manic side of biplar disorder).

For example, when my gentle, gifted, funny nephew is manic, he has fantasies of hurting or killing people and enjoying it - that is what finally drove hem to treatment. When he is not manic, he is disgusted by the thought of things that seemed like fun to him when he was manic. Thank God he never got to the point of carrying out any of his fantasies.

So it matters because I believe Kanye's untreated (by his own admission) diagnosed bipolar disorder is driving much of what we saw in the oval office - and I don't believe he would behave that way if he were treated/we had adequate treatment for bipolar disorder.

Just as it is not appropriate to attribute all vile behaviro to mental illness, it is also imporant to recognize when it is likely the source of the behavior, so we don't throw people away because their disease drives them to act in a certain manner.

Here's a more concrete example. People with Tourette's sometimes blurt out very vile, racist things. We can recognize the behavior is driven by Tourette's syndrome (and recognize the person is not racist at core) OR we can say they are just a racist (and Tourette's was driving the blurtting out - but that the content was the result of inherent racsim).