I really appreciated this post by Gelman — I don't always empathize with his writing, but it was a good thing to learn about this side of his experience, him being someone that I think of as being on the other side of that social inclusion continuum. At the same time I agree with you that it's hard to know what to make of it because he did obviously get through it, and the problem is that so many don't, for many reasons.
I have maybe too many reactions to put into words, but the thing I wrestle with most about the phenomenon he's pointing to is why isn't this more fully acknowledged by the community, however you define that? It's the strangling silence about these types of phenomena that is maybe the worst, at a number of levels. When you're going through it, I think part of the problem is that there's no inputs to provide a different perspective, to show you "hey this looks this way but it's not". It's not even within someone's abilities at that point at some level, as you're lacking any sort of realistic social inputs. Then, at another level, why doesn't, say the academic community come to terms with how common these sorts of pathological dynamics are, and how dominant they are in outcomes? Why isn't the broader nonacademic community more aware of these kinds of problems?
I don't think these sorts of issues are without consequence either. For example, this story isn't really about the same thing, but I do think it starts to involve related social problems, that had worldwide implications for COVID, measles, and tuberculosis: https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu... . To me one of the worst problems with politicization of COVID science is how unrealistic both sides seemed to get, with one invoking strange conspiracy theories when typical academic politics is trouble enough, and the other seemingly in denial about any sort of problems in academic science.