> Drapetomania was a proposed mental illness that, in 1851, American physician Samuel A. Cartwright hypothesized as the cause of enslaved Africans fleeing captivity. This hypothesis was based on the belief that slavery was such an improvement upon the lives of slaves that only those suffering from some form of mental illness would wish to escape.
One not mentioned, but similar to Clennon W. King, Jr. - Joan Trumpauer Mulholland. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Trumpauer_Mulholland
> In the spring of 1960, Mulholland participated in her first of many sit-ins. Her civil rights activism was not understood, being a white, southern woman. She was branded as mentally ill and was taken in for testing after her first arrest.
Timothy Snyder wrote about this idea directly: https://snyder.substack.com/p/antisemitism-and-antisemitism
The flipping of cause and effect language is also directly out of one of his lessons.
TDS is like calling Ukrainians russophobic. It flips cause and effect. It frames criticism as irrational hatred so that the accusers can see themselves as victims. It dismisses problems with trump or Russia as blind hatred and directly ignores any harms caused by them.
I don't know the name for this technique, but it is straight out of Russia's playbook. There is even a history of weaponized psychiatry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry#...