Why We Need to Stop Calling People With Mental Illness “Crazy”
How the language we use can perpetuate stigma
When he told me I’d “lost my mind,” I wouldn’t have been quick to disagree.
The last time someone called me “crazy”, I was indeed standing face-to-face with my inner madness. In yet another failed attempt at romantic love, years of traumatic memories had come crashing in over my head. I was lost in a savage sea of post-traumatic flashbacks, floundering like a panic-stricken child thrown overboard without a life jacket. Love came to a screeching halt during one unretractable moment of maxed-out-fight-or-flight mode, in which I clumsily flailed to find my way out of the shark-infested waters of my mind, and left the wreckage of something-once-known-as-love in my wake.
It was a scenario that had become all too familiar to me. As a survivor of childhood sexual trauma, my demons were triggered any time I engaged in a physically intimate relationship. In a relationship, it wasn’t uncommon for my post-trauma danger signals to take over at nearly every turn — an expression of mental illness that was impossible to live with for long, both for myself and my partner. It was indeed maddening. One might say, “crazy”-making.
