Have you ever been told you’re crazy? I don’t mean as a euphemism food or “eccentric” or “fun”. Have you experienced a person who is not your healthcare provider telling you and anyone who might listen that you’re “mentally ill” or “delusional” or “in need of help?”
How did that make you feel? Helped? Validated? Supported?
Yeah, me either.
I have trust issues for some seriously valid reasons. Most of us do. It can keep us from being our best selves. The question is: how do we help each other, support each other, get through this, if we cannot trust or be deemed trustworthy? Out in the wilds of the Interwebs where we aren’t forced to look each other in the eyeballs, the temptation to project upon and go at someone you dislike can be tempting. From behind a keyboard and in person, we’ve all done it.
Some of us find our illness has changed our level of aggression or impulsivity. If that’s you, you deserve compassion for it. Some of us feel paranoid, and we’re at high risk for projecting our crap onto other people, taking things personally that aren’t personal, or inventing sinister backstories about people’s motives. If that’s you, you deserve compassion for it. Turns out that texting is also terrible for any relationship, so are trolling bullies who have rocks instead of carbo Levodopa in their backpacks. Mix the two and get dragged away from what matters — the tough work of advocacy, in it’s myriad of forms.
Some of us are a walking panic attack who can drain the batteries of everyone else in the room (I know this is sometimes me), and if it’s you, you deserve compassion for it. So many of us have been betrayed by ride-or-die friends, by parents or siblings or children, by partners or lovers or spouses. Some of us have been thrown under the bus by a medical proxy or a doctor. If that’s you, I bet you’re gobsmacked! I was, when it happened to me.
Every day, all over the world, multiple, seemingly contradictory things are true simultaneously. My experience doesn’t invalidate yours. Yours doesn’t invalidate mine. If two people are in the same house looking outside opposite windows, the person in the kitchen is going to see a totally different view than the one in the back bedroom. Both views are real. Reality is terrifyingly subjective — that’s why we agree to consensus illusions like “time” and “society” and “normalcy.”
Here in Parkie City, most of us are pretty traumatized. I know I am. Dealing with disability and the degradation of your motor skills and memory (not to mention the sometimes very freaky side effects of meds) isn’t for the faint of heart.
Also: real harm is done to real people when other real people weaponize the language of abnormal psychiatry. I’m not sure if it’s more dangerous to lob crazy-bombs with, or without, actually understanding the clinical meanings of the words. If you sling terms like “narcissist” and “gaslighter” and “psychopath” and “bipolar” without knowing their clinical definitions, that’s incredibly irresponsible. If you know better and do it anyway? That’s incredibly irresponsible.
Calling people we disagree with or dislike at a personal level “insane” or “crazy” or “unstable” is, in the best case scenario, ableist, which is a seriously unflattering look, whether or not you’re in a support group for a progressive brain disease. But as much as it would be nice to get neurodiversity a little of the dignity it deserves, there’s more to this than avoiding “problematic” language.
Using pathology language to vilify, invalidate, trivialize or dismiss someone is, inherently and unequivocally, abusive. It is a massive lapse of ethics and it has no place in civilized discourse. And no, it isn’t better if you wrap your not-a-doctor pathologizing in “I’m worried about you” language. Between trusted friends, in private, this can be a legitimate thing to say. Hand-wringing about other people’s psychological status on social media is called “concern trolling” and we need to be clear that “trolling” is the operative word, not “concern.” As in, the concern is fake. The bullying and the enabling of bullies is all too real.
I’ve called people crazy too, but it’s a demeaning term we use to distance ourselves from ideas or behaviors we find uncomfortable or threatening. It serves no other purpose. There are mental illnesses; some devastating, some manageable. People can have narcissistic traits without being narcissists (in fact we all do; it’s developmentally crucial for toddlers, and teens). Clinicians have intense rubrics for locating the blurry lines between personality and actual pathology. They train for years to discern that stuff. If you haven’t done that work, it’s unethical and in some cases malicious to use these words to minimize one another.
It’s becoming clearer, as I struggle to figure out how to get my pants on or temporarily forget how to walk down a staircase, that we all can and must do better. I am resolving to eliminate pathology language from my vocabulary. I’m not a diagnostician, and even if I were, that wouldn’t be appropriate unless you were my patient. And if you were my patient, I’d choose my words even more carefully, because legitimate brain disorders are scary, and my code of ethics and mandate to heal demand someone’s situation with extreme mindfulness of how my words might affect them.
I’d like to suggest that if you live within Parkinson’s Disease or any other neurological disorder you especially need a reprieve from having ableist language used to trivialize your experience, invalidate your lived reality, and steal your sense of peace with a double feature of tears and loneliness followed by another “what if I’m completely incoherent and don’t even realize it?” panic attack.
Can you think of one person with a progressive degenerative disease affecting every aspect of life who needs help questioning their reality? We’re doing that all the time, probably more harshly than you could possibly hope for. Am I in a bad mood or is this a permanent loss of function? Did it really just take me fifteen minutes to pour a glass of water? I can’t find my car keys; is this dementia? Do I need a therapist, a neurologist, or a priest?
Nobody is everybody’s cup of chai. Any given person will find some people invigorating and others exhausting; we all have people who appreciate us and people who wish we’d go away. The view is different for each of us as we look out our individual windows. All of this is OK
May I suggest that we can all at least try to put a sock in it around using psychiatry language as our personal speargun? It’s not fair. It’s wrong, and I do mean morally. It is an innately harmful thing to do even to a “normal” person.
In advocacy and support spaces dedicated to actual brain disorders, labeling peers as crazy is just plain unjustifiable.
Could we shake hands (so to speak) on this and just agree to have some manners about this one thing? Chronic disease, disability, and progressive incurable conditions are overwhelming enough. It would help me, so I’m inclined to think it might help others, too.