They’re paying him money. I’m desperately jealous, and annoyed because I’ll have to update my blogroll.

Mr. DeBoer wrote a very personal article about his medical struggles with mental illness. He’s diagnosed with bipolar disorder and has struggled with mania and depression throughout his adult life. A few years back he had a manic episode that blew up into paranoid delusions, and it ripped his life apart.

Since then, he’s been on a horrific cocktail of drugs just to keep him on the rails. Lithium, benzos, antidepressants, amphetamines, and more. To me the most frightening of side effects (one Freddie doesn’t confess to experiencing) is tardive dyskinesia, which happens mostly with the old-school anti-psychotics. (In this video, they’ve positioned the camera so the speaker’s mouth is hidden by a little rail. It doesn’t work to disguise the dyskinesia. It may not cause any real harm, but it must be horrible to live with, and Freddie’s at risk.)

In the face of all this, in the face of his own shame over his past antics and the grim day-to-day reality of drug cocktails and a long-term prognosis which offers only the most distant and difficult hope, Fredrik DeBoer endures with heroic stoicism.

And he has a fine mind! From his professional writing you would never suspect the guy is a bug-eye. He’s smart, open-minded, pro-social and forthright. He argues in favor of competing points of view. He questions the weak characters, the antisocial tendencies of the left, and they hate him for it. Freddie really has copped an ungodly amount of online abuse from the left, and he takes that stoically as well.

Fredrik DeBoer does not align with me on some of the moral fundamentals. But if he’s in the opposition, he’s the kind of opposition I want. He’s in good faith, he’s honest, you get the feeling you could persuade him of things.

Definitely worth a read.