Which Kinksters Are The Most Mentally Ill?

comparing different fetishists against each other

In my Big Kink Survey, I asked people about what fetish categories they were into. I also had them check off which mental illnesses they had.

This is self-reported, I didn’t ask about official diagnosis. I did ask the question in such a way as to eliminate mild illnesses. This isn’t a very rigorous question, it’s one question out of over a thousand and I had to compress it into as convenient an ability to answer as possible.

That being said - I got to see how many items from this list people picked. For this post, I’ll be looking not at what people picked, but the amount. This is their ‘mental illness score.’

It’ll be cool to break down the specific illnesses later, but for today, we’re keeping it simple.

The sample size for this is ~400k. Normally my sample is bigger but for convenience today I decided to just randomly downsample the females until I got about 200k equally of both men and women. You can read about who the sample is here.

I then made a brand new survey, and asked people to predict how mentally ill various fetishists were.

I then took people’s average guess at the percentile of mental illness of various fetishes. I then compared this to the mental illnesses of people with these fetishes - so for example, I’d take all the people who were at least moderately into ‘feet’, and of that group of people, what was the average number of illnesses they selected from the list? I then converted this into percentile.

But first, predictions!

I’m gonna ask for one prediction for this one - which fetishes did people drastically overestimate the illness levels of?

In this chart, it’s the two in the green circle. These are very taboo fetishes, and people assumed that these fetishists must be very mentally ill. However, those two fetishists reported the same mental illness rates as people into sex toys and reproduction - two very vanilla, common fetishes.

(I’ve asked a lot of people irl to predict this, and everyone tends to get it wrong. Except for Emma Louise Boynton; she somehow got both of them correct on her first guesses)

To be fair, I haven’t checked the type of mental illnesses yet. Possibly the more taboo fetishes tend to have people with more severe mental illnesses yet, to some degree. But I’d doubt this explains all of it; mental illnesses tend to all occur together - for example, in my sample, 60% of people with schizophrenia had ADHD (compared to 35% without), while 2.0% of people with ADHD had schizophrenia (compared to 1.1% without).

So - which fetishes are unfairly maligned, if we can frame it that way? Make your guesses here.

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Alright, the answer is below. Here’s the same graph, with labels