I came of age as a mental health professional in San Francisco, arguably the most politically conscious city in the United States. Since then I’ve spent a decade on campus at a large university serving students in the 21st century. I’m aware that some people consider the word “crazy” to be ableist, i.e. a slur against those who experience mental illness.
It is certainly a word that has been used to cause pain. I know I’ve had it used against me that way in my own life, and the memory still rings in my ears during my darkest moments when I’m being eaten by self-doubt.
But I have been obsessed with words and language all of my life. Crazy is functional and versatile word, and while of course I agree that it would be a better world if we were to stop hurling at one another to wound each other, I am not willing to relinquish its other perfectly good applications in my personal life.
In my personal life. Mental health clinicians don’t really use the word. It is partially true that we don’t use it because it is so often intended to be stigmatizing that there are few contexts in which it would conceivably be appropriate out of the mouth of a mental health professional at work. But that’s not really the larger reason that you don’t hear us use it among ourselves. We don’t use it because once discussing the specifics of mental health is your job, it’s just not a useful word anymore.
Many people assume that there is such a thing as “crazy,” but there is not, either psychiatrically or legally. Crazy really only exists in the colloquial, casual-use senses.
Legally, however, they get much closer, with the concept of insanity. We’re all familiar with the idea of the insanity defense from movies and television courtrooms, though you’ll be astonished to read that it’s not often that it’s portrayed accurately onscreen. Here in California, the legal definition of insanity is determined by the McNaghten Test, the local version of which is similar to such rules throughout the English-speaking world that all harken back to British caselaw. A person is legally insane if, because of a mental illness, s/he either cannot understand the nature of the criminal act, or cannot distinguish between right and wrong.
That “because of a mental illness” there is doing a lot of work — clearly the second half is all about culpability, but that first clause is really where we address the question of how lawyers figure out whether someone qualifies for their chosen synonym for craziness. And the answer is that here the legal professionals refer the problem back to us, the mental health professionals, which means now we have to dig into why we don’t bother with the concept of “crazy.”
Well, what do you mean by crazy?
Most laypeople using the term colloquially to describe others are invoking Merriam-Webster’s second definition of “not mentally sound : marked by thought or action that lacks reason : INSANE”.
The MetaFiction Cycle 