Matt Walsh

It's been a while since I've taken a hatchet to the legacy of a highly unlikable, crusty feminist icon.

But today, Virginia Woolf's time has come for reasons that will become clear in a moment.

She's actually a useful foil for talking about one of the biggest issues facing this country right now, which is the never-ending expansion of psychology and psychiatry.

These are fields that have done more damage to the United States than any other branch of medicine.

Mental health treatment is, in very many cases, the modern-day lobotomy.

And before any more lives are destroyed, we need to radically rethink our approach to so-called mental illness.

The mainstream approach to these issues over the past several decades has not worked.

It has made everything worse, as I will demonstrate.

And it's time for people to think critically and deeply about

and take seriously some arguments that challenge their fundamental assumptions.

So that's what we're going to do today.

But for now, back to Virginia Woolf.

In case you're not familiar, she was a British novelist who, in modern times, has been retroactively diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

She was a miserable person in every respect.

She would often refuse to eat or sleep.

She claimed that she heard birds singing in Greek.

And she even threw herself out of a window at one point.

Now, all this naturally has made Wolf a hero to feminists everywhere.

Wolf's family and friends described her as being mad or manic depressive or afflicted with a case of nerves owing to her regular mental breakdowns.

And as part of her treatment, Wolf was force fed a lot of cream and beef in order to make her fat on the theory that her behavior was the result of depression.