Let’s Talk About Crazy People.
Because I don’t believe in them.
I don’t mean that as in, I think they’re fictional. I mean that as in, I think we should stop using words like “crazy” every time we don’t feel like critically thinking about a behavior. For the purposes of this story, I’m leaning on a colloquial definition of crazy, which is “someone did a thing that I find hard to accept/seemed unpredictable or unexpected, so I’m tossing it up to them just being crazy, a lunatic, insane, or a nutjob, and washing my hands of trying to understand it.”
Roll up your sleeves and dive in with me. And know that I’m making generalizations for the sake of brevity — but fair ones. (Also, full disclosure: getting the word “crazy” out of my vocabulary has proven incredibly challenging, so this is not admonishment y’all!)
For back story, I’ve been studying human psychology and behavior on my own for years — inspired in part by an unabashed love affair with the hit TV drama, Lie to Me (I love you, Tim Roth) — and am now in graduate school for a masters in clinical social work. Clinical social work is therapy with the added spice of learning about social systems that affect our development, and therefore our thoughts, feelings, and actions. I also have two anxiety disorders, experience situational depression, and grew up with a family that both 1) had mental illnesses and 2) were so scared of the stigma around mental health that almost none of them ever sought help.
Which means nothing, really, because I’m just a person with ideas informed by my own experiences like everyone else. About a year ago, I started thinking that maybe I didn’t believe that “crazy” was even a real thing.
For starters, I really strongly believe in the adage, Hurt people hurt people. It identifies a simple, basic truth: a lot of people do shitty things to other people because shitty things were done to them (usually repeatedly and usually by people who were supposed to protect them), and many of them never developed (or had the opportunity to develop) a grasp on how NOT to get their needs met by being shitty. Which may sound counterproductive to those of us who got our needs met in healthy ways, but that’s a privilege not afforded to all.
Children and adolescents who experience trauma (such as community violence, rape, physical assault, or neglect) sometimes have an underdeveloped sense of empathy because it took so much more than it should have for them to get their own needs met, and all of their conscious focus was spent on survival. Those kids often become adults who act in ways that we find socially unacceptable. But is behaving in these ways because you were abused or in consistent danger during formative years the same thing as being crazy? Nope; it makes total sense.
There’s another thing that will turn you into a jerk that has nothing to do with your mental health: repetitive exposure to subtle, hateful ideology over a period of time. This means that some Christians treat others like garbage because of religion, that some men treat women like garbage because of sexism, and that many European-Americans treat almost everyone else on earth like garbage because of racism. When I look at Neo-Nazis, the KKK, and even the Taliban, I don’t see “crazy.” I see brainwashed, and the two are not the same.
Brainwashed is what we are when we think a black kid in a hoodie is an immediate threat, but not an old white dude in a Texas Burger King carrying a rifle. Brainwashed is what a man is who stabs a woman because she rejects him at a bar and he felt entitled to her attention. Racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia — these things live in our unconscious minds, but none of these make us “crazy.” Are they fucked up? Yes. Are they unpredictable? I mean, not really. Is literally anyone surprised by the slime coming out of the woodwork thanks to He Who Shall Not Be Named for the Next Four Years?
And look, I don’t mean that being brainwashed by a patriarchal white supremacist society means we’re not accountable; it’s our responsibility to figure out where we were brainwashed, why, and how to unlearn it. Choosing not to because Things Are Real Hard and we’re too lazy to not be jerks doesn’t absolve us of the harm we cause. I do mean that there’s no known biological basis for things like racism and transphobia — they’re taught, not genetically inherited — so they can’t be blamed on our DNA.
And for the record, it’s really fucking insulting to those of us with actual psychiatric diagnoses to lump us in with assholes by calling them “crazy.” It demeans us on a subtle level, just like any -ism, and there’s already a global stigma against admitting you have mental health issues. This is especially true if you have a disability based on your psychiatric diagnosis. (It’s called ableism, btw, because we have the best words.)
Why is there a stigma?
Because you don’t want to be…crazy.
So now let’s look at actual mental illness, because my eyeball twitches and I have to remember how awful jail would be every time some rando sees my work badge and says, “OHHH, you work with the CRAZIES.”
People have this idea that mental illness is unknowable, unpredictable, and scaaaarrry-yyy. Look, most mental illness is depression and anxiety, which every one of us has experienced at some point. Maybe not enough to be diagnosed with a disorder, but for real. Come on; you can’t live in this outrageously unwell society and not also occasionally be unwell. There’s a whole book dedicated to what we know about mental illnesses, it’s nicknamed the DSM 5, and it will literally tell you everything we’ve figured out so far about mental illness. It can’t possibly be comprehensive because, like deep space, the human psyche is un-explorable with what technology we currently have, but it’s something (and thinking that science alone can understand the human psyche is like saying science alone can understand why Dr. Who is so goddamn addicting).
The DSM is like a book of maps when our minds are the 3-D terrain. And I’m still not on team crazy here.
Now, we’re down to the shit that people typically understand the least: personality disorders and schizophrenia. You’ve heard of some of the personality disorders no doubt, and they likely are the ones that are most identified with the idea of “crazy” or “insane:” borderline, narcissistic, anti-social, and so forth. Personality disorders are a special breed of mental illness because they often do not respond to medication and therapy. They are often borne out of extreme cases of neglect and abuse during childhood. They occur on a spectrum (meaning that one case might be milder or more extreme than another) and have a set of characteristics that are knowable.
Schizophrenia and similar disorders are also ones that people fall back on when someone’s acting a way they don’t understand. This network of disorders can be incredibly disabling and has few treatments. If you belittle someone who actually suffers from schizophrenia for having this illness, you are a grade-A piece of human garbage, because it is one of the fucking worst. And yet, schizophrenia has a range of knowable characteristics, and has less to do with childhood trauma in many cases than just a brain that functions outside the average range of behaviors. Illnesses? Yes. “Crazy?” Nope.
Is this all to say that being an asshole and being mentally ill can’t overlap? Or that being overtly racist and having a severe psychiatric disorder are mutually exclusive? Of course not. It’s to say that it’s really important to know where the boundaries between them live, and to stop using “crazy” as a way to define something we don’t understand. It has terrible effects on those of us working our asses off on our mental health.
So, here’s my bid for us to be better at compassion: when someone’s doing something frustrating or surprising or socially unacceptable, let’s stop and think, what’s happening for them that they’re behaving this way? Because that’s really what compassion is: putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes to feel what they feel. And if you can imagine what they feel, then you can take thirty seconds to imagine what circumstances may have transpired to create that feeling within them.
Sure, sometimes they’re just absolute Assholes with that capital A.
But I just can’t believe that they’re “crazy.”
Final rambling notes for those of you who just can’t get enough:
- If you’d like to be traumatized but also better educated on the development of personality disorders, pick up a copy of The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog by Bruce Perry. Seriously though, ALL THE TRIGGER WARNINGS.
2. Mental health is intrinsically linked to forms of oppression: oppressors have used “illness” as a way to punish and isolate people that disagreed with their ideologies. Google to learn about women + hysteria, and “protest psychosis” (the idea that African-Americans were afflicted with a special kind of illness that showed up through protesting for their civil rights — and gave white doctors reason to lock them away).
3. For a metaphor for understanding the structure of the psyche, visit here. There’s a diagram.
4. There are two major contributing factors to the development of a mental illness. One is what we call a vulnerability, or your genetic/biological susceptibility for developing a disorder. The second is your environment. They work together inversely: the greater the vulnerability, the less environmental stress it takes for a disorder to develop. Likewise, the lesser a biological vulnerability, the more environmental stress it might take for a disorder to develop.
This is why no two traumas can be compared. This is why no one gets to say, “toughen up,” or “hey, that other guy that experienced that is doing just fine,” or “people with (insert mental illness here) are weak.”
Everyone handles environmental stress differently, not only with coping skills they’ve been taught during childhood (or lack thereof), but because of uncontrollable genetic vulnerability to illness. This vulnerability is greatly increased if mental illness runs in your family. (This is an extremely simplified version of how mental illness works, but it’s a fair foundation to start with.)
5. Finally, the term “mental illness” is a bit of a fake term — it’s actually a term that can be defined by each state individually, so that a state can decide whether or not something like substance abuse/addiction will be considered a “mental illness.” In the field, the term is “psychological disorders,” which has a more solidified and non-political definition.
Find out more at www.thewildfrancesca.com & on Instagram
For the new publication I’m working on, check out Witches Rise here on Medium
Thanks for reading!
