(by chris the cynic)
[Note for unfairly blaming people with mental illness using rude terminology]
So I was going to write this brilliant post about how dismissing certain actions and viewpoints as “crazy” is downright dangerous because often the actions are done or the viewpoints are held by perfectly sane people who happen to do/think evil things. If you don’t recognize them as sane people who will do harmful things, you underestimate the danger because sane people can generally do a lot more damage than those who are not and furthermore calling it “crazy” shifts the focus onto people with mental illness without ever addressing the root of the problem: mentally healthy people are doing bad things.
As you might have guessed from this being an open thread, I never did write that post. But it does bring up a topic for an open thread:
What are some things where you think the terminology people use hurts innocents, prevents real problems from being addressed, or otherwise frames things in a bad/dangerous way?
I wonder will this post if I don’t try to log in?
Abortion discussion erasing the woman. ‘Welfare queen’. Rape culture.
How to describe a mentally healthy person whose knowledge of the world is, deliberately, orthogonal to the actuality of the world? Like, a young-earth creationist, or someone whose idea of preventing another Newtown is arming elementary teachers.
A bit strange that my comment would get eaten, when I tried to say this before, but I think I had a connectivity problem at the exact moment when I was submitting. Anyway:
I wonder will this post if I don’t try to log in?
Yes it will, but it will wait for someone to approve it first, and between when you hit post and when someone says, “Yeah, that’s ok,” it will look to any outside observer like you never tried to post in the first place.
How to describe a mentally healthy person whose knowledge of the world is, deliberately, orthogonal to the actuality of the world?
Personally I would go for willfully delusional. Like “depressed”, “delusional” has different meanings based on context some of which do include mental illness, but I would hope that the “willfully” would point out that these delusions stemmed from a mentally healthy* person’s choices on how to view/interpret the world and not from any kind of mental illness. And the more general than mental illness definition of delusion/deluded/delude/delusional definitely seems to apply.
I would not go for a bare “delusional” unless it had already been established that we’re not talking about mental illness because I think that without a modifier people default to the assumption that delusions are mental Illness based.
That said, if anyone has a better way to describe it, I’m all for hearing it.
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*Or, if not mentally healthy, the lack of mental health wasn’t related to the delusions. Someone could be mentally ill in a way that doesn’t lead to delusions and still be delusional for non-mental health related reasons. For that matter there are probably delusional people where some of the delusions come from mental illness and others do not. It’s complicated.
[More discussion of terminology for mental illness being used to talk about mentally healthy people doing bad things. Also genocide and gun violence. And painfully wrong beliefs about how the female body responds to rape.]
At the moment the standard yardstick of evil is the Nazis, I don’t know why it isn’t Stalin or something (after we stopped being on his side vs the Nazis of course) but it does always seem to be Nazis. Note Godwin’s Law.
Afterward it was believed that going along with the Nazis was just crazy (probably not the exact word used, but it’s what we would use today) and for so many Germans to be complicit must mean that Germans have a higher percentage of craziness than everyone else and it’s just sitting there waiting to come out given the opportunity.
This is one of the problems of “crazy” and dismissing things as “crazy”. It allows us to distance ourselves from those who do horrible things. They’re crazy, we’re not. Clearly we never need to worry about doing something like that. Any need for serious self reflection has been averted. We can comfortably say that we’d never do such a thing.
A second problem is that it’s not true. People thought it was and since some of them were scientists they devised tests to prove (or at least support) the hypothesis that it was. The tests did not work out as expected. Turned out we were just like them, and they were just like us, and “crazy” was not an adequate explanation. It wasn’t an explanation at all.
The tests were fiddled with but to no avail. Sane people would do horrendous stuff.
According to at least one version of the story the famous Milgram experiment was originally designed to be one such test but it never moved beyond stage one (gathering a baseline showing that normal sane people wouldn’t do horrendous things) into stage two (showing that the results were different among Germans) because stage one showed that, yes, normal people will do terrible things.
So the problem isn’t “crazy” the problem is sane. Sane people are dangerous. Insane people are too, but I think (though I don’t have statistics on hand) somewhat less so on a person per person basis and significantly less so on a group basis (because sane people are better at organizing into coherent groups that move toward a common goal.)
But even more so, even sane and insane rather than “crazy” and “not crazy” leaves a problem. Sane comes from the Latin for “sound” as in “Mens sana in corpore sano” (sound mind in a sound body) and plenty of mentally ill people have minds that are still quite sound. Ill, but sound.
And making the conversation about “crazy” means that anything that is done will become about “mentally ill,” and that is a major problem. Before I actually get to why, I want to go on a tangent about how we identify people as mentally ill.
Diagnosis for mental illness is notoriously bad to begin with. Not because of any quackery or ill intent (though there is some of that) but because it’s a lot harder to diagnose a mental illness than it is to look at an X-ray and see, “Oh, your arm is broken.” And remember, sometimes people look at an X-ray of a broken arm and still flub the diagnosis. Mentally healthy people are diagnosed as mentally ill, mentally ill people are diagnosed as mentally healthy. This stuff is hard and even when doing their best and working in good faith fuck ups happen a lot.
I’ve been suffering from the long lasting form of depression for as long as I can remember, and the shorter harder hitting one in bouts here and there for probably just as long. So all through grade school I had it, and I had regular meetings with my family doctor the entire time, he never noticed. It was only when I came to him and said, “I seem to have depression,” which was, if memory serves, in late high school, that he noticed, “Oh yeah, I guess you seem to.”
Other people have been diagnosed with depression when they clearly didn’t have it because the doctors were at a loss to explain their symptoms (stemming from physical injury, not mental illness) and so that was their best guess. (In at least one case these doctors were also assholes who didn’t trust the patient, but the point remains.)
And once you are mentally ill according to the medical establishment you basically never stop being mentally ill. I broke both of my arms (one at a time, it’s not like there was a period when I was without a good arm) and they healed and I no longer have broken arms. That’s the way many or most physical problems are dealt with. They have an end. Not so with mental illness.
If you’re diagnosed with schizophrenia you’re probably never going to be considered to not be a schizophrenic. Even if the problem is solved. Even if you never exhibit a symptom again. Even if you never exhibited a symptom in the first place and the diagnosis was wrong. You’ll be in remission, or under control, or not exhibiting symptoms at the moment, or this long since your last incident, but you’ll never be pronounced sane.
So, even if mentally ill people were at the root of whatever problem “crazy” is being blamed for, the problems with diagnosis and classification of mental illness mean that that’s probably not where your solution lies (but I am all in favor of any plan to make mental health services available to a wider swath of the population.)
But, back to the original point. Generally speaking the problem isn’t mentally ill people, it’s mentally healthy people. Which means that using “crazy” to shift the focus onto mentally ill people shifts the focus away from the actual problem.
So it stops being, “How do we stop a second Holocaust from happening?” or, “What do we do about this gun violence?” or whatever and starts being, “What can we do about these mentally ill people?” Which means that solutions to the actual problems will not come up.
And for the record, I’d rather be in a room with an armed schizophrenic who was selected at random from the population of schizophrenics and then given a gun than an armed, mentally healthy, neo-Nazi who was selected at random from the population of mentally healthy neo-Nazis and then given a gun.
Before I move on to politics, I want to talk about one last thing. Some violence defies explanation. Some is completely rational. If you honestly believe that abortion is murder, government sanctioned murder at that, then taking up arms against abortion doctors is a rational, sane, response. It is not crazy. If there is a murderer in your community, someone who is openly committing murder on regular basis and none of the appropriate authorities are doing anything to stop it, then the moral weight falls one the shoulders of ordinary citizens and (while I do not condone assassination or bombings) taking that route isn’t crazy or insane or mentally ill, it’s one of the options a rational sane person could consider.
These actions of murder and terrorism stem from sane responses to beliefs I vehemently disagree with. (I don’t think abortion is murder.) Trying to pass it off as crazy will not do. If something worse than the Holocaust were going on and the government had condoned it violent resistance is one of the responses not-mentally-ill people would consider. So if people believe that something worse than the Holocaust is going on, the violence that results from that isn’t “crazy” and no attempt to deal with “crazy” will deal with the problem.
You either need to increase security (note that there are ways to do this beyond, and more effective than, arming more people), convince them that non-violent resistance is the way to go, or convince them that there is not something worse than the Holocaust going on. Perhaps some combination of the three. None of that is helped by assuming the problem is the “crazy” and the solution is to keep mentally ill people away from dangerous things.
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Ok, so, politics. Certain beliefs are dismissed as “crazy”. That. Doesn’t. Help.
In fact it hurts. Because the “crazy” label allows them to be dismissed. And when they’re dismissed they’re not opposed. And when they’re not opposed the sane people who hold these beliefs can get elected and enact them.
The idea that gay people should be killed is “crazy” there’s no way that we should have to concern ourselves with that in the USA. It’s on the fringe, nothing will ever come of it. Right? Tell that to the people in Uganda who, because of the meddling of people from the USA, have had to suffer under draconian laws. (Draco/Drakon was an ancient lawgiver. Not a lot is remembered about him except this: he wanted to use the death penalty a lot. For all kinds of things. “Break the law = now you die” is a draconian system. Draconian means really, really harsh. Nothing to do with dragons.)
The idea that we could have government mandated rape, forcing patients to become rape victims and doctors to become either criminals or rapists (since when is not committing a rape supposed to be criminal?) seemed “crazy” and so it wasn’t given serious thought until it happened. The people had already been elected but that idea was too “crazy” to be passed here so it wasn’t given serious attention, serious consideration, or serious opposition until suddenly it was about to happen and the election had come and gone.
And why shouldn’t it be ignored, you’d have to be insane to… wait, no. You’d have to be sane, have a different set of values, and work toward the ends dictated by those values using rational ends. Which is what happened.
I’m not worried about a crazy person in government with really bad ideas and evil ends in mind. I’m worried about a sane one. Someone who is rational, someone who can think things through, someone who can write a bill and wrangle support. Someone who can lead a movement and pass a law. Someone who has their mind in good working order, their thoughts in line and their end in sight. (Random thought: if the people who have been screwing over reproductive rights had had my level of depression, and didn’t have treatment, they’d never have made it as far as filing for candidacy. Mental illness would have saved us.)
Even such people occasionally slip up. Professing the belief that women have the magical means to use internal contraceptives on rape sperm or what have you. But you have to remember, he was elected first (12 times, 6 to serve at a national level). And to anyone who looked back at where he came from, that statement should have come as no surprise, but no one was looking back when the election happened because beliefs like that are just “crazy” and so we can keep them out of the national discourse.
When something happens that is evil, or stupid (not going to get into the etymology right now but you know how after something huge and unexpected and otherwise shocking happens you’re in a sort of daze where you can’t think straight? That’s what the word actually means) or massively retrogressive or horrendous or tragic or just plain wrong, the odds are really, really good that “crazy” is not to blame for it. Sanity is probably to blame, sanity warped by false premises or a bizarre world view or anachronistic beliefs we thought we left behind years ago, but sanity none the less.
Sane people are responsible for most such things, and dismissing those who do them as “Crazy” shifts the blame onto an innocent population (the mentally ill) stops us from any serious introspection (what would it take to make me do that?) prevents us from solving the problem (how did this happen and how can we stop it from happening again?) and also gives others cover to do the same things later on, because if you’re not “crazy” you wouldn’t do that, and if something is “crazy” we don’t have to worry about our leaders doing it here, so we don’t have to consider it when picking our leaders.
Killing people isn’t crazy, it is evil. (Exceptions for self defense and other such ethical dilemmas.)
Restricting reproductive rights in draconian ways isn’t crazy, it is evil.
Saying we don’t have to consider rape because the female body can shut that whole thing down isn’t crazy, it is stupid and misinformed and ultimately leads to evil ends.
Trying to make a distinction between legitimate rape and all those other rapes isn’t crazy, it is evil.
Using crazy when you should be using evil makes it sound like all mentally ill people are evil while ignoring the very real threat of mentally healthy people who are evil.
Using crazy when you should be using misinformed make it sound like non-mentally ill people are always right, and blames the mentally ill for all wrong beliefs held by the mentally healthy.
Using crazy when you should be using stupid makes it sound like all mentally ill people are in a state of constant brain-fart while ignoring that non-mentally ill people act like they’re in that state on certain topics.
Using crazy when you should be using horrible again shifts the blame onto the mentally ill and off of wherever it should be placed.
Using crazy when you’re actually talking about the mentally ill is just plain rude.
I would like it if we could somehow, magically, disconnect “crazy” from “mentally ill” so we could have a catch all term for “evil/stupid/wrong/horrendous/laughably inaccurate/I think I’m going to cry now because that was so very, very wrong/and so forth” not to mention preserve the positive connotations of crazy which I find useful as well.
But it doesn’t seem to work that way. Maybe someday it will, but right here right now in the world we live in “A crazy person with a gun did…” leads to, “We should have a national database of all mentally ill people.” Which means that crazy still means mentally ill, and it does so on a policy making level because that was a suggested policy from the most powerful lobbying group in America.
And the truly sad part is this. Whenever “A crazy person with a gun” does something, it doesn’t matter whether they’re mentally ill or not. The “crazy” in that phrase, when you break it down, is referring to the part that people with and without mental illness do: kill innocent people by using guns. Maybe the “crazy” person was mentally ill. Maybe the “crazy” person wasn’t. Either way the problem isn’t mental illness, it’s that some asshole with a gun did something bad with that gun.
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And I think I have the words, if probably not the polish or coherency, that I could have written that post after all.
What are some things where you think the terminology people use hurts innocents, prevents real problems from being addressed, or otherwise frames things in a bad/dangerous way?
Lately I have disliked the framing of trollish/asshole behavior as “stupid” or even “willfully ignorant”. I think that framing cedes the idea that the person who is, say, treating basic human rights as a “devil’s advocate game” is just in need of more/better education.
While that may be possibly the case (given the individual instance in question), I think that framing closes off an alternative hypothesis: that the troll/asshole knows perfectly well that what zie is saying is wrong and just doesn’t care.
I think it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of “educating” trollish viewpoints (which tends to be draining on emotional resources for a lot of people), rather than firmly refuting a harmful argument and expecting the trollish person to keep up with the conversation.
But that’s maybe just me.
@ Ana
Stupid assumes good faith. They’re better than this they are just, for whatever reason, not operating at full capacity right now/in this area. It’s insulting, but it’s insulting in a way that acknowledges that the person is acting in good faith.
Willful ignorance assumes honesty. They’re not exactly acting in good faith because their position is based on actively avoiding learning better, but they’re telling the truth about what the position is.
I can see how both of those are a problem when you’re frequently dealing with people who know better but pretend not to in order to piss people off.
And I suppose it would depend on the space you’re in. In an early math class asking why symmetry doesn’t mean that -1 x -1 = -1 the way +1 x +1 = +1 is perfectly reasonable (and has a variety of possible answers most of which are true because math is like that.) If you’re in the middle of a class on differentiating functions whose domain is the complex plane the teacher is probably tempted to respond, “Because two half turns make a whole turn. Moving on, jerk-face,” because it’s neither the time or place to do 101 stuff.
So, yeah, I see how both of those are problems where I probably wouldn’t have if you hadn’t said anything.
[CN: Example of racism]
And I suppose it would depend on the space you’re in.
Most definitely. And the context of the question. There are certainly Advanced Feminism concepts that don’t immediately click for some people. And then there is stuff like, off the top of my head, “black people are ungrateful if they don’t vote for the Party of Lincoln” which is the sort of thing that cannot stand a moment’s worth of internal scrutiny and which I am far more likely to chalk up to trollishness rather than just not quite getting it.
Chris, your post of 12.55 pm covers pretty much everything I wanted to say, and more. So I’ll just mention a lyric that’s been bugging me recently:
And though she’s not really ill,
There’s a little yellow pill.
I think mental illness is understood nothing like as well enough as people would like to think it is, and while being able to section off (British pun) “the mentally ill” from “normal people” is very comforting it breaks down as soon as you start to push it. One could reasonably say that no normal person would commit a mass murder of total strangers, but of the people who do so plenty have no history of mental health problems (even in places where such problems are looked for as a routine thing). I’m becoming convinced that like most things in biology it’s a continuum, and wherever you draw the line, by whatever metric, there will be people on each side of it who “should” be on the other.
So I’ve been training myself not to refer to things that make no sense to me as “crazy”. It’s a start, I guess.
I tended (past tense, because I’ve been reasonably successful at excising it from my vocabulary), to use the word crazy to mean frantic, unable (temporarily) to think straight. I would say things like I’ve been crazy busy this week. I don’t think that, in itself, is damaging, but I’ve seen enough people saying that the word had bad associations for them that I decided to stop using it altogether.
Another word I tend not to use is evil. I think a distinction can be drawn between evil people, evil acts, and evil intentions (indeed, it would not occur to me to conflate these: they seem, to me, obviously distinct categories), but (as demonstrated so memorably on this blog not so very long ago), many people do think that any one of these implies all the others. And since evil people is a distinctly problematic category (for the same reasons as mentioned for crazy: it labels horrible acts as coming from an “other” we don’t need to worry about), I find it simplest to avoid the word altogether. (Also, this leads to fewer distractions and side-arguments when debating with Christians, which is something I do now and again.)
TRiG.
@Trig
And here I just wrote a whole post on the subject of evil. A long one too.
Now I need to compile the weekend post where I’ll likely link to it again.
I think a lot of the discussion around sex and sex choices have a lot of really unhelpful terminology, but I’m not sure if that’s because a lot of our expletives and curse words revolve around sex, or whether there aren’t enough people who are comfortable talking about kinks and choices, or whether the environment that privileges men to have lots of sex and insists women shouldn’t even talk about it, much less enjoy it or seek it out basically populates the language with misogynist and performative terms.
So, yeah, problematic, but I don’t know which possibility is the likely one that needs addressing.