The Danger of YUNGBLUD’s “Psychotic Kids”
HASSAN GHANNY is a novelist, essayist, and mental health advocate who resides in Boston, MA. His writing has been featured in The Caribbean Writer, Cuepoint, Scroll.in, Burnt Roti, and The West Indian Critic. His first novel, NMQP, is completed and seeking a publisher if you happen to know anyone.
I hate the word ‘psychotic’. Not because it’s a bad word, or even a useless or meaningless one, but because it’s a word that tells me almost nothing about the experience behind it. I say this as a peer support worker in a mental health program who interacts with persons with mental health issues and the clinicians that treat them. When one of my colleagues describes one of their patients as “quite psychotic”, I always have to ask them to elaborate. Is this person actively hallucinating? Are they hearing external voices, or do they perhaps have a persistent and distressing voice that’s more internal? Even in programs where treatment is centered around the experience of psychosis, more precise and nimble language is often needed to be able to simply describe that experience, let alone begin to remedy it with medication, therapy, or peer mentorship.
Outside the outpatient setting, though, ‘psychotic’ has a dubious meaning when used by the general public; too often, a pejorative one. While it’s in my role of peer specialist to actively combat stigma around…
