[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.

[bpchaps]

Dude, this is a forum about startups. I'm not going to be academically precise in my arguments for a huge list of number of reasons.

I'm not suggesting that this isn't a complicated issue, but that there are many ways to go about looking at it and a significant amount start with simply listening to those who have issues and go from there. The other steps include treatment and low level understanding, but the step that's almost never addressed are the societal issues and it needs to be done, sooner than later.

I'm not talking about these issues to convince anybody on any sort of academic level. All I'm doing is expressing my thoughts that MANY others share and live through. It's literally painful that so many people push back on this since it's something that strongly affects me, and many others, so strongly. I talk about it on forums like YC because I want to help others build an understanding of an issue that is never, ever black and white and whose gradients are wide and scattered. By writing, I'm just trying to help others, even if it might be small. The small things add up, though. Demanding that I treat this as academic where my intentions were a discussion and to hope to push others to search for information themselves is just obstructive. I'd hope that if you're so academically interested in this subject, you'd do a simple google search yourself.

But fine, if you want precision, here, have a google scholar search that took 10 seconds to run. Five of those seconds were after forgetting a !scholar in my ddg search, so if you choose to run one, it'll probably take even less time. Woo. These are a good place to start if you want good information.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=bullying+mental+illness...

And for completeness, have a book on the subject:

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=HOf12LnjtqIC&oi=...

http://www.reddit.com/r/bipolar

There's your citation.

[Chris2048]

Just to backtrack - the issue here is whether the word 'crazy' is necessarily insulting or not, regardless of context; I never opened for a discussion about anything else.

> I'm not going to be academically precise in my arguments

You're the one who mentioned academia. A citation needn't be "academic", it just needs to be anything that demonstrates what you are saying is true. When I put "citation needed" in quotes, I only meant this. And here's why I think you should do that:

> When someone is called crazy, they're making a parallel to a crazy person...

I don't think this is true, And a since it's clear that people in this thread use the word in a way they believe to be benign, I think it's fairly accusatory.

As such, Without backing this up, you're just throwing around an unsubstantiated insult to anyone with the word 'crazy' in their regular vocabulary. If you want people to stop using the word, why not explain why they should, instead of accusing them as "simplifying the problem in an incredibly brazen and unempathetic way".

[lacantina]

The "not strictly" only adds to the insult. You have group A, people who would be judged clinically insane (or borderline, which is more of an emotional issue). Let's call them true crazy. True crazy is bad. You have group B, much larger, people with inappropriate behavior that probably isn't going to lead to a psychiatric diagnosis, perhaps rather they just have a lack of self-control or good judgement. Let's call them false crazy. False crazy is a slur because of what it says, that your behavior is bad, bad like true crazy. And so the thing is, every time you use it, what you're also saying is that true crazy is worse than this.

The "acceptable use" that you're claiming is basically the same as calling someone or something gay, or someone a fggt (sorry, HN probably bans comments for using that word), even though the person and/or behavior in question has nothing to do with homosexuality. I hope this clarifies things a bit.

[Chris2048]

This is the "you hit like a girl" argument.

But the distinctions between "true" and "false" crazy are ones you just made up yourself; I have no reason to believe this is what the word "says" at all.

The term "true crazy" implies that there is a formal link with the word to clinical mental illness, as opposed to just a euphemism for it.

[bpchaps]

For what it's worth, it actually doesn't. I used it in a quote in a recent post :p

[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.