meet the unundead

[the_siobhan]

Like many of my posts do, this one started out as a conversation with Axel the other week. I was noting just how many people I seem to know who have some form of mental illness. Everything from depression and anxiety to PTSD right up to the big boys like schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder.

I gotta say, it's a great thing for me personally, because it means there is almost no experience that I can't bounce off of somebody for feedback. But it did occur to me when I was having yet another conversation about the voices in my head with a group of friends who were nodding and saying, "When that happened to me..." and "What my voices do is..." Well, it occurred to me that there is an awful lot of collective crazy in my social circles.

Which makes me wonder why.

Possibility one is that mental issues are a lot more common than anybody acknowledges or recognizes and my friends are just your average cross-section of the population.

Possibility two is that I tend to select my friends from people who are more likely to be mentally or neurologically "different" from the norm.

I'm kind of inclined to think it's 60% option B and 40% option A.


On a slightly related topic, I've seen a lot of feedback on progressive blogs that "crazy" is an ableist slur in the same way that "retarded" or "lame" is. In that people use the word crazy to describe certain kinds of negative behaviour (the kind of behaviour, say, you see coming out of people like Mel Gibson or Charlie Sheen) when really the person's mental health is a completely separate issue from the fact that they are just a full-blown asshole.

I can kinda buy that. I'm unlikely to stop refering to myself as crazy any time soon though.

Comments

[kalmn]

i think that a person gets to talk about themselves in different ways than other people get to talk about them. i call myself a cripple a bunch. i wouldn't recommend anyone else do it-- yes, you can out run me, but i am sneaky, have a long memory, and can be mean when i put my mind to it.

[the_siobhan]

One of the first examples I ever ran across of reclaiming negative words was at a part-time job I had in high school. One of the guys I worked with was in a wheelchair and he wore a button that said "Crip Power!".

[mr_sharkey]

I was going to comment that "I was noting just how many people I seem to know who have some form of mental illness.", was probably more a function of how your group of friends is more 'out' with their mental illnesses, but then you went and explored that possibility :)


M.

[reddragdiva]

I have no compunction in calling crazy bullshit "crazy bullshit", and if someone told me I shouldn't say that because it's an ablist slur, I would first assume they were trying to get away with crazy bullshit, because that's been the case every time anyone's previously told me I shouldn't say that. The notion that correctly labelling someone's crazy bullshit as "crazy bullshit" is somehow worse behaviour than the crazy bullshit. I have too much experience with the stuff.