[jholman]

Utterly unpersuasive. The reasoning in that Quora response means that "harasser" and "wrong" are also slurs, because the Quora response equates denigration with "slur territory".

As an ongoing fact in my life, I've noticed that (a) I use words like "crazy" in broad and insulting ways, and that (b) some people seem to complain about it. And I'm open to being persuaded that I ought to change my ways. But I haven't yet heard an argument that persuades me.

It seems to me that the whole notion of "craziness" or of "mental instability" or even "mental health issue" etc is the notion of socially-atypical behaviour that the speaker judges to be harmful or undesirable (as contrasted with "eccentric", etc). If I hear someone say "that's crazy", I assume they mean "that's weird and I disapprove". (I haven't quite nailed it down. There's a bit more nuance here, in that if someone says "that's crazy", and then someone else says "it's not crazy, it's evil", then you can imagine the first persona conceding the point... so clearly "crazy" sometimes implies a certain degree of helplessness in the bad-weirdness.)

Do you think "crazy" means something fundamentally different from this? Do you actually think it makes sense for people to stop observing that behaviours or people are atypical, or stop observing that they disapprove of particular instances of weirdness?

At this risk of going on a tangent, here's a tangent. Sometimes advocates for people with mental health issues note that it does not make sense to fear folks with mental issues, because such people are more likely to be the target of violence than the perpetrator. What a hilarious fail. I assume that it's true that such people are more likely to be the target than the perpetrator, but I don't care. I care about whether they're more likely to endanger me than an apparently-not-sane person is to endanger me. It's not some kind of zero sum game where being crazy makes a person more endangered and thereby makes them less dangerous to others than they would be if non-crazy.

[bpchaps]

As someone who's called "crazy" because of mental health issues, I use "crazy" all the time to describe things that are colloquially "out of this world". That said, I would never, ever use that word to describe another person. It's a very, very harsh word that I, and others, unfortunately hear very often. Like I said in a previous comment, it fucking sucks to hear. Usually it's from a third party telling me after the fact, which for some reason, makes it sound even worse - probably because it took a lot to get that person to even bring it up.

[bpchaps]

Sorry for the double post, I just wanted to comment on your last point.

Holy shit. Just because someone has a mental health issue doesn't mean they're violent. Everyone I know who has mental health issues are the friendliest people I know. This is the exact sort of attitude that makes issues with HR incredibly difficult. And trust me, it is unbearably difficult. I can't explain how many times and how frustrating it is to explain this to so many people. We're mostly sincerely good people, albeit, 'off'. Sorry for my brain, yo.

[jholman]

I don't mind the double-post, but I'll reply to both of them at once.

I have mental health issues. Nearly everyone I care about has mental health issues. Some of those issues are moderately serious problems, some are minor annoyances. It sucks having problems. I'm sad you have problems. I'm sad I have problems. I hope your problems resolve themselves, and/or you learn better coping strategies, and that life is as nice to you as possible.

But none of that changes my perspective that it's reasonable for me to characterize the world around me. And I have a limited cognitive budget. There's a whole bunch I don't know about the world, including mental illness, so I by no means assume that my model is terrific, but I still need to make choices. Y'know, I don't know if it will rain today, but I still need to decide what jacket to wear. Identifying other human behaviour as extreme is useful. Identifying other human behaviour as harmful is useful. Identifying other human behaviour as extreme-and-alarming-in-ways-that-seem-like-maybe-they're-mental-illness is useful. Knowing more would be better, but I've got a whole bunch of shit to learn, and this is seriously not my top priority. Based on all of the above, it seems to me that the only sane thing to do is sometimes identify other people's behaviour as crazy. And since I live in a city, with millions of people, most of the people I meet get an instant shallow analysis, because otherwise I wouldn't get anything done. So for my limited-cognitive-budget purposes, some people are "that crazy person". I don't know if I've never called a person "a crazy", but I don't see a problem with doing so.

To your point in this comment, I never for a moment said that "just because someone has a mental health issue, they're violent". I encourage you to read more carefully. I said that arguing about their probability of victimhood is a logical fail that does not help address fears that such-and-such a person is a threat. It has no predictive value, and will not persuade most people that have the concern in the first place.

[DanBC]

> Based on all of the above, it seems to me that the only sane thing to do is sometimes identify other people's behaviour as crazy.

> I encourage you to read more carefully.

You should take your own advice.

Again most people in this thread have said: describing behaviours as crazy isn't the problem. Describing people as crazy is.

> but I don't see a problem with doing so

It makes you sound stupid. It makes you sound like that embarrassing racist grandparent.

It creates a culture where it's acceptable to shoot and kill people with mental illness (about half the people killed by US police each year have mental illness). It creates a culture where people with mental illness are discriminated against in the workplace. It makes it harder for people with mental illness to seek treatment.

Stigma kills people.

[lacantina]

Another problem is that it can make people so angry that it's difficult to articulate coherent replies, so thank you.

[nicelynicely]

You can call/describe People whatever personally but people will judge you on a personal level about that too.

If you are writing a piece to be published then more appropriate terminology should be used, or you get judged on more professional level along with personal level.

[DanBC]

First about violence: You're wrong. Mental illness does not predict violent behaviour. Someone with a mental illness is not more likely to hurt you than someone without a mental illness. This is very clear from all the statistics we have. You not knowing this is a concrete example of your ignorance of mental illness.

The fact that you don't care that vulnerable people are frequently the victims of violent crime (and partly because they've been dehumanised by people calling them crazies) says more about you than it does about predicting violence.

> If I hear someone say "that's crazy", I assume they mean "that's weird and I disapprove". (I haven't quite nailed it down. There's a bit more nuance here, in that if someone says "that's crazy", and then someone else says "it's not crazy, it's evil", then you can imagine the first persona conceding the point... so clearly "crazy" sometimes implies a certain degree of helplessness in the bad-weirdness.)

But in this thread someone isn't saying "these behaviours are crazy", they're saying "these people are crazies".

I don't care what language you use. But you need to know, so that you can make an informed choice about the language that you use, that when you use words like "crazies" to describe groups of people it's the same to many people as someone who says things like "I got jewed on that deal", or "those uppity negros". You're on the wrong side of history, and it makes you sound like an ignorant bigot. If you don't care about that then go ahead, but if you do care what people think of you then you might want to use different language.

Another reason to stop: by describing people who do things you don't understand as "crazies" you're promoting stigma against mental illness. Since you want people with mental illness to get treatment it seems weird to create a culture that makes it harder for them to do so.

Another reason: Severe mental illness (bipolar, psychosis, borderline) affect about 5% of the population. This will include people you know, or their relatives. You're inadvertently insulting your friends. You probably don't want to accidentally offend people you know. One of the reasons they haven't told you that they (or their loved ones ) are medicated is because your views are stigmatising and discriminatory.

[jholman]

> First about violence: You're wrong

Wrong about what? What claim did I make that's wrong? Oh, wait, you're just assuming that I disagree with you, so that you can be mad. You assume that I assume that mental illness predicts mental behaviour, but I said nothing of the kind. I think? Right?

> Mental illness does not predict violent behaviour.

That's an interesting claim (interesting in the sense that I am interested, but not yet convinced). Two minutes of googling found mild disagreement with your claim, and was in general utterly consistent with my previous beliefs (e.g. [0]). Care to cite evidence in favour of your claim? If it turns out that you're correct about the facts, I'm interested in knowing more.

[0] http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/about-us/reports-stud...

Note, btw, that while the summary at that link makes it look like you're right, when you read the actual findings, it says the opposite of what you claimed.

So, unlike when I wrote the previous comment, now I have started to believe that mental illness _does_, to a small degree, predict slightly increased violent behaviour, though not nearly as much as being young or male or substance-abusing, all of which are about as surprising as the sun rising in the morning.

> The fact that you don't care that vulnerable people are frequently the victims of violent crime

This sentence is you being an asshole. Please stop. Obviously I meant "when I am assessing whether or not I should consider mentally ill people dangerous, what I am concerned with is whether or not I should not consider mentally ill people dangerous, as opposed to some other issue which is unrelated for the purposes of my security". Obviously I did not mean "In general I care about no one but myself" or some other farcical interpretation which no one would admit to in public.

> But in this thread someone isn't saying "these behaviours are crazy", they're saying "these people are crazies".

That is not a correct description of this thread. My comment was a reply to a comment that contained a link, which talked entirely about whether or not it was okay to call people and behaviour crazy. Did you follow the link and read the argument? Your description of "this thread" is a correct description of the original word used in the title of TFA, but the conversation is at this point broader than that. I dunno if I personally have ever called anyone "a crazy", but maybe I have.

> by describing people who do things you don't understand as "crazies" you're promoting stigma against mental illness

I'm not at all convinced that that's true. I think it promotes stigma against the behaviour characterized as "crazy". And I think it's pretty clear that that's what is happening in TFA's title: online harassment is being implicitly characterized as so inappropriate that it brings into question the health of the brain that committed it. I'm in favour of that implicit characterization.

> Another reason: ..... You're inadvertently insulting your friends

I don't agree that I'm insulting the friends, and family, and loved ones, and self, that I know, with mental illness. (You're so cute in your assumption that I'm in the privileged group.) If we're all getting along fine, maybe the problem is you. Or maybe you're right, and I misunderstand everything, and the problem is me. But just stating your implausible claim over and over again is frustratingly unpersuasive.

Thank you, by the way, for not getting distracted by the claim about violence, and after making your comment about it, moving on to the more interesting main point.

[DanBC]

Your link is from an advocacy group! But even that advocacy group suggests that people with a mental illness are not violent. If you're going to ignore their summary you probably need to have read the studies they link to. Being polite, you haven't had time to read the studies they link to. Some of those studies will include things that you find surprising, and that don't support your point about violence. For example, sometimes studies include self harm as an example of violent behaviour. Some of them include violence against objects. And some of them don't correct for multiple violent events committed by one person.

Here's one example of a well run meta analysis that includes self harm in the list of "violent behaviour": https://www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn/depts/hspr/research/ciemh/mhn/pr...

(Note that the UK part of that paper is not talking about mental illness in the general population, but is restricting itself to a tiny subset of that population. Not just inpatients (about 8% of the people under specialist care) but people in a forensic unit. Those people are there because of a criminal justice involvement in their care. Even in this group of violent people we see a small group of people are responsible for most violent events.

This narrowing of focus - not all people with mental illness, but smaller and smaller sub-groups is why saying "crazy people are dangerous" is just dumb. You have to (using the link you provided) say "crazy people, with this particular diagnosis, when they're not getting treatment, are a little bit more dangerous than the general population, but less dangerous than parents, and less dangerous than poor men, and less dangerous than people with a substance addiction."

And even then you've failed to distinguish between "people who are violent because they have mental illness", and "people who are violent and co-incidentally have mental illness".

The group at most risk of homicide is children under one, and the people doing the killing are parents or step-parents. Why aren't you calling all parents dangerous?

http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandj...

Focussing on mental illness and violence is sub-optimal because it focuses on a very small risk and it focuses on something which provides no predictive value. When you have someone in front of you and you want to know whether they're going to be violent or not knowing that they have a mental illness, even a severe and enduring illness, doesn't help you. Knowing that they are (various combinations of) male; poor; addicted; a (step)parent or (ex)partner; are all more useful to you.

But this ignorance about the minimal risks of violence from people with mental illness causes actual measurable harm. About half the people shot and killed by US police each year have a mental illness. (Although it's hard to get accurate numbers because the US doesn't collect this data).

http://www.bbmh.manchester.ac.uk/cmhs/research/centreforsuic...

Sorry for the long and complex report, but it's best quality evidence that the UK has about homicide by people with mental illness. Page 30 is homicide in England. Most homicide is committed by people without mental illness; most people with mental illness have no connection with violence. People with mental illness are not over-represented in the group of people convicted of homicide.

http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandj...

> I'm not at all convinced that that's true. I think it promotes stigma against the behaviour characterized as "crazy". And I think it's pretty clear that that's what is happening in TFA's title: online harassment is being implicitly characterized as so inappropriate that it brings into question the health of the brain that committed it. I'm in favour of that implicit characterization.

Well, this feels like a contradiction. You start by saying it's not promoting stigma; you end by saying crazy people do hateful things. Why use the word "crazy", why not use the word "asshole"? There are so many other words you could use it seems a shame to marginalise an already marginalised group.

(Also, it's against HN rules to call other people assholes. Your ignorant first post is you being an asshole, but I didn't call you an asshole. You should probably stop doing that.)

[skybrian]

"Crazy" even when not strictly about mental health implies lack of self-control or good judgement, which will be insulting for people who pride themselves in self-control and good judgement.

"Weird" or "bizarre" is perhaps a little more neutral.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Except that this time next week / month / year someone will take huge offence to the terms 'weird' or 'bizarre'.

This is a witch hunt and the target is any word that can be used to differentiate.

We need to remember that we do not have a right to be offended.

[bpchaps]

No, stop that line of thinking. Please.

When someone is called crazy, they're making a parallel to a crazy person on a train screaming about how they didn't take their meds.

When someone who has legitimate mental health issues is called crazy, it makes light of a very serious issue that's incredibly difficult. It has next to nothing to do with being offended. We all accept that we have issues that we're mostly able to manage, but you're completely simplifying the problem in an incredibly brazen and unempathetic way.

If you want to see a sample of it, just check out /r/bipolar. When I was first diagnosed, I spent about a week there, but had to stop going because it was too intense.

Completely coincidentally, here's the second post from the top right now that shows just how hard it is to fit in socially: https://www.reddit.com/r/bipolar/comments/4f4se2/i_believe_f...

I feel like I need to invest more in forming connections with people, learning to not feel so extremely uncomfortable around people, becoming interesting and fun to be around as a person, but I don't know how to find strength, energy, and time to do so.

This is a very common attitude.

[jholman]

> When someone is called crazy, they're making a parallel to a crazy person on a train screaming about how they didn't take their meds.

I do not agree that this is what is intended, or heard, by the overwhelming majority of speakers of English, when that word is used. It seems to me, with a great deal of (fallible) confidence, that people usually mean something much less extreme.

> When someone who has legitimate mental health issues is called crazy, it makes light of a very serious issue

I do not agree that it makes light of the issue. I don't understand what is light-making about it. I do think that it puts the problem in a tidy pigeonhole, which the actual problem probably doesn't fit into. But people do not have infinite cognitive resources, and so they oversimplify things when they think they can get away with it, and as far as I can tell, this is one of those cases. That's not "making light", it's just "not paying a ton of attention".

Perhaps I'm wrong about either of both of those things. That would be a powerful and relevant-to-my-interests case for you to make, and were to you be successful at updating my belief, I would be grateful.

[Chris2048]

> When someone is called crazy, they're making a parallel to a crazy person on a train screaming about how they didn't take their meds.

"Citation needed" for this, especially when a post back an opposing opinion was offered:

> not strictly about mental health, implies lack of self-control or good judgement

[bpchaps]

Why is citation needed? This is from raw, personal experience that's shared amongst the mentally ill who I've talked to and who I've read from online and other medium. If you want citation, just go to any forum dedicated to mental health.

And please don't declare this as selection bias. This doesn't need to be academic. I'm just offering my experiences that are simply shared with many others. Requesting citation for pervasive issues like this is just an easy way to not address or discuss a complex and complicated issue.

[Chris2048]

> Why is citation needed? This is from raw, personal experience

You don't label it as such (as subjective), and I think this is required more when contradicting a previous opinion, with a hint of accusation (i.e. it would imply people using the term would be guilty of something offensive). The comment previous includes the words "not strictly"; meaning "This isn't always what this means, but it can also mean this".

> Requesting citation for pervasive issues like this is just an easy way to not address or discuss a complex and complicated issue

How is shunning "academic" evidence addressing the issue? If it's complicated, there is a need more more precision, not less.

I won't declare this to be selection bias, but I won't assume it's not either. Testimony is a weak form of evidence. Maybe strong or persuasive evidence isn't what you intended to communicate in your comment, but I feel you need to provide something like that in a personally accusatory post ("No, stop that line of thinking. Please."), because it makes someone look bad without strong justification.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

> No, stop that line of thinking. Please.

Caution, Thought Police patrol this area. Please stop thinking. Freedom Of Thought is not allowed.

I'll think whatever I like, thank you very much. I reserve the right to have opinions that differ from yours. I respect the idea that my opinions ought not impinge on your freedoms. I don't have to like a thing to see the sense in it. Yes, we shouldn't go around calling each other names, it might affect a person in a negative way.

I certainly don't have a habit of going around labeling people ... well, actually, I guess I do: we all make internal judgments about people and things we experience. What I mean to say is I tend not to go around calling people words, because who knows how that might affect the other.

Relating to that quote you provided from r/bipolar, what I really want to see is us crazies, I say 'us', because that quote fits me well too. I want to see us crazies "come out"! I'm crazy and I'm proud! We could have a bumper sticker too: I have Mental Health Issues and I vote.

And anyway, to be well-adjusted to an insane society is no measure of health.

In 2014, there were an estimated 43.6 million adults aged 18 or older in the United States with AMI (Any Mental Illness) in the past year. This number represented 18.1% of all U.S. adults.[1]

One in five of the adult population of the US with AMI. Mental Illness is the new normal. I think there's more to this than "illness". In a similar way to how homosexuality used to be labelled an illness, I look forward to a future where we are no longer labelled "ill" but where society acknowledges that we have some pretty serious issues going on on this planet and our individual and collecting stress-coping mechanisms aren't coping. We are a sick society that has been doing a darn good job of wrecking the biosphere, and through profit-driven motives been working to isolate people so they'll buy more. How anyone can think that isn't going to affect our mental health is beyond me.

I believe a lot of the lower-grade chronic mental illness people suffer is a symptom, like a blocked nose is a symptom of a cold virus, mental health issues are a symptom of failing stress-coping systems. And the stressors are real. Modern life is stressful, it's alienating, it's under slept, over worked, it's underpaid, it's in too much debt.

We're overdue for a societal colonic. Nothing like a good shit to help clear the mind.

1. http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/prevalence/any-men...

[bpchaps]

Yes, I fully agree with you that a lot of the symptoms of mental health issues are often symptoms of larger issues. I see this in myself, and I see it in others. Often times, all that's needed is to take vitamin D, less caffeine, stricter diet, environmental changes, etc.

That said, the propensity for those with mental illnesses to resort to drugs, false rationalizations and misinformation to assist in understanding their problems makes these issues very, very difficult and complex for everyone involved. For those with mental health issues, removing those soft and hard dependencies is incredibly difficult, since they're so easy to fall to, on top of their prior problems. You're simplifying an issue without realizing that mental health problems are often only the catalyst that's furthered by forced isolationism. For example, although my own mental health issues seem to have been around since birth, they were only pushed farther, possibly permanently, after being put on amphetamines to aid with the bipolar and its comorbid's symptoms.

And quit the bullshit about thought police. I'm just asking for an attempt at empathy with an attempt to not resort to the usual SJW rhetoric.

[monkeyhippo]

I'm bipolar too, I appreciate you trying to educate people. This place is pretty hostile when it comes to understanding.

[monkeyhippo]

You know, I used to be really arrogant, but then I started listening to people that try to tell me things, and now I just wish I'd started doing that sooner, because I regret spending so much of my life as a bigot.

Crazy means insane, like belongs in a hospital.

[trhway]

> I assume that it's true that such people are more likely to be the target than the perpetrator, but I don't care. I care about whether they're more likely to endanger me ...

nice, man. The combination of your egoism and [lack of] empathy reminds about that rant of an SF techie against those homeless people because their presence affects his enjoying of life.