[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".

[bpchaps]

As I mentioned in another post, I'm perfectly fine with the word "crazy" in its use similar to "out of this world". I use it myself all the time since it's a crazy good word to describe a large class of stuff. I think the misunderstanding here is that I assumed you read that post.

[foofoofoofoo]

> 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.

Your either willfully rewriting history or deliberately unaware of the context of this thread.

This thread started because the author was referring to people harassing him as "crazies". It's not a benign usage.

It really sucks that people will go to such lengths to defend hatred.

[Chris2048]

> Your either..

false dichotomy. The context of this thread is not the authors harassment; and your example is not a benign usage, but that does not contradict the statement "people in this thread use the word in a way they believe to be benign".

I also believe your post breaks HN guidelines.

[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