I really think it’s a mistake to treat colloquial uses of “crazy” (or “wacky,” “nuts,” etc.) as being slurs against the mentally ill.
When someone says “you’d have to be crazy to vote for Donald Trump,” they’re not referring to people with depression, or manic-depression, or OCD, or a thousand other things that people for which people might need or seek mental health treatment. It’s a figure of speech meant to refer to “someone who behaves in a completely irrational way, unhinged from reality.”
That’s a useful concept, and I have yet to hear a suggested replacement word or phrase that wasn’t terribly cumbersome. Which matters, because it means that there’s going to be a lot of resistance to changing the language, and from a “picking your battles” perspective it seems unwise. But more importantly, I think the campaign to make “crazy” an unusable slur is actually counterproductive, because it sends the message that “mental illness” = crazy, which I thought was the message that advocates for mental health have been fighting.
Screechy Monkey, I wholeheartedly agree. And as someone who has been through treatment for mental healthy issues, I have no problem with that use of the word crazy. I simply never thought the word “crazy” applied to me or people like me who were struggling with an illness.
I really think it’s a mistake to treat colloquial uses of “crazy” (or “wacky,” “nuts,” etc.) as being slurs against the mentally ill.
When someone says “you’d have to be crazy to vote for Donald Trump,” they’re not referring to people with depression, or manic-depression, or OCD, or a thousand other things that people for which people might need or seek mental health treatment. It’s a figure of speech meant to refer to “someone who behaves in a completely irrational way, unhinged from reality.”
That’s a useful concept, and I have yet to hear a suggested replacement word or phrase that wasn’t terribly cumbersome. Which matters, because it means that there’s going to be a lot of resistance to changing the language, and from a “picking your battles” perspective it seems unwise. But more importantly, I think the campaign to make “crazy” an unusable slur is actually counterproductive, because it sends the message that “mental illness” = crazy, which I thought was the message that advocates for mental health have been fighting.
Screechy Monkey, I wholeheartedly agree. And as someone who has been through treatment for mental healthy issues, I have no problem with that use of the word crazy. I simply never thought the word “crazy” applied to me or people like me who were struggling with an illness.
Whoah…this J&M is so meta!! :D
J&M is often meta – in fact it’s probably always meta!