"The Most Radicalizing Thing in My Life Has Been Becoming Disabled"
Nathan Shuherk (aka @schizophrenicreads) on the TikTokification of disability, capitalism, and getting offline and into books.
Nathan Shuherk is probably the only content creator I like at this point. He’s better known as @schizophrenicreads on TikTok and Instagram, where he makes videos about non-fiction books. He was kind enough to talk to me about disability, how it changed his views on the world, and why he’s hopeful that people are getting off social media and beginning to read books more.
So how’d you end up being a content creator in the first place?
Back in 2017 I was really invested in mental health advocacy spaces—non-profits, speaking events, fundraisers—and I became so absolutely disenchanted with that world. I thought it was deprived of all, like, real meaning. And so I quit right as the pandemic started. And then I sat for a year and didn’t know what I was doing with my life. I’m on disability, so I don’t work, and so I started making book content just as a kind of public journal, just as a way to have conversation with like five of my friends. And I almost instantly gained an audience. It’s a way for me to spread some slight commie propaganda around while also keeping myself entertained. I also have a podcast now and am working on a book about schizophrenia and society and my life and capitalism. It’s kinda just become a whole thing. It pays very, very little but it’s weirdly fulfilling. I generally like it, as much as the internet sucks.
Can you talk about why you called your page Schizophrenic Reads in the first place, and a little bit about how your diagnosis fits in with your life?
I just used my diagnosis as the name. I thought it was kinda funny. I’m a schizophrenic who reads. But also colloquially, schizophrenic means divided and disjointed, and since I’m jumping around to different genres it just made sense.
I thought I’d do more mental health conversations on TikTok and Instagram, more personal discussions of my own symptoms or how I relate to the world, and I do occasionally, but I’ve just found the internet to be devoid of good people when I talk about my illness, so I mostly stick to books.
I was diagnosed when I was 19. My symptoms started as a freshman in college and immediately interrupted my life. There were a couple of suicide attempts and hospitalizations and I was really struggling to be a college student while also managing all that. Trying to go to class, trying to date, trying to be fun. It was just absolute chaos. And then, at some point, I started taking medication and things calmed down for me and life settled a bit. I tried finding a job, and I’d find one, and then work for three days and then quit. It just came completely untenable. And so I filed for disability. It took a year and a half and was an awful and extremely exploitative and stressful process.
I’ve been on disability since then, and I’m lucky to have parents who can afford to help me with housing and the material aspects of life. But I also have to turn down most work and any kinds of successful sponsorships or anything because that would kick me off disability—if I make more than $1,500 a month, I’d lose disability. I can’t get married to my partner of five years because I’d lose my insurance. I have to play by these stupid little government rules.
So I hang out and read books all the time and go for silly little walks and talk to people on the internet. It’s weird being retired at 31 while living in a perpetual state of poverty. But getting to rest and focus and distance myself from work is probably the reason I’m still alive today. But it just creates this cycle of poverty that is genuinely inescapable for almost everyone.
Has your disability changed your view on the world?
The most radicalizing thing in my life has been becoming disabled. If I was continuously trying to work, I would be in a much worse place. I think specifically in how it relates to labor, and how inflexible everything is, and the need for health care—disability is incredibly radicalizing in those regards. Seeing that first-hand has radicalized me in all these other ways too. It’s allowed me to see how oppressive the system is toward so many people.
I grew up in a family where by the age of eight I was going to like Republican fundraisers. I went to private Christian schools. I was basically on a path to become a Republican Congressman from the Midwest. My disability, my depression in high school, the isolation I experienced because of those things, those helped me take off the rose-tinted glasses. Watching society from a distance, you can see more clearly how fucked up everything is.
One of the things I’m trying to write about in my book is that it’s not just that things are bad, it’s that we live in an unreality, where things don’t even make sense. The rules of capitalism are so confusing.
And work contributes to all that. My partner has ADHD and autism and they’re functional enough to work and I just watch their life and how unsatisfied they can be and know that they could feel so much happier and creative and joyful if they just were allowed to work less. That simple realization—that we could live lives where one vet bill for our cat wouldn’t send us into debt. Once you realize that, you feel like maybe things are so bad that society is just ready to crumble. I don’t think it is exactly crumbling, but at least in this psycho-social sense, we all have that feeling that it is.
How does the internet fit into all of that—radicalism, disability. I feel conflicted about that because on the one hand it’s good that people can talk about these things online, but I worry that by diagnosing ourselves so much, we kind of excuse the external conditions making us feel this way. We blame what’s in our heads instead of what’s in our lives.
Online, the TikTokification of autism and ADHD and that kind of stuff, that’s one particular lens through which people are viewing the deterioration of American existence. It’s not a perfect lens, and social media platforms definitely aren't perfect, but I also think it can be radicalizing and broadly a good thing.
But I think we have a diagnosis supremacy problem. Like we truly believe that diagnoses are impactful and matter more than anything else.