Crazy, Not Mentally Ill

I just finished listening to a great audiobook. It’s Words on the Move, by John McWhorter, a professor of Linguistics. Between that and Ann Curzan’s The Secret Life of Words from The Great Courses, I learned a lot about the English language over the past year.

And the important thing is that language changes. Words gain new meanings, shed old meanings, and gain additional meaning while retaining the old ones.

Which brings me to the word “crazy.”

Sometimes, when I use it on Facebook, someone will implore me to not throw that word around so casually, as it makes light of mental illness. Or perhaps after a suicide, someone will ask us to think about how we use the word “crazy” and what it says about the stigma we attach to mental illness. But I’m going to argue that “crazy” doesn’t always mean, and perhaps didn’t always mean mentally ill. In fact, I’m also going to argue that when most of us really want to talk about someone who’s mentally ill, we actually use the words “mentally ill.” Crazy is something else altogether.

So what is “crazy”? Let’s ask Patsy Cline.

In her song Crazy, she sings, “I’m crazy for crying, and crazy for trying, and crazy for loving you.” Does she really mean that she’s mentally ill? No…she was saying something more along the lines of being unrealistic, of having thoughts that were too far-fetched to be reasonable. Or working totally against logic.

So why not use those words instead? That’s what some people in the mental health community suggest. The answer is one that John McWhorter could easily tell you…because a word is more than the snapshot in time that its dictionary meaning gives you. Besides, many words have multiple dictionary definitions. A quick check of dictionary.com gives us:

• mentally deranged, demented, insane
• senseless, impractical, totally unsound
• intensely enthusiastic, passionately excited

Only the first definition implies mental illness as we now understand it, and is probably not even the main way that most of us use it (more on that later). The second describes what Patsy Cline was singing about and talks about people with crazy ideas. And there are more that aren’t even covered there.

When I talk fondly about my crazy ex-roommate, I’m not saying that she’s mentally ill, and you know that. I’m also not saying that she was senseless or impractical…far from it. But she was bizarre and outrageous…in a fun way.

And what about the person who “drives you crazy”? Are we really saying that they cause you to be mentally ill? No…they’re affecting you to the point where you can’t think straight, another common definition of the word. I suppose you could say that mentally ill people can’t think straight, and yet, no one says that we should be careful about using that phrase because it stigmatizes and minimalizes mental illness.

But sometimes the person we describe as crazy really is mentally ill…and we didn’t know it. I have a friend who talks about her crazy ex-boyfriend (one of the reasons why he’s an ex-boyfriend), and later found out that he wasn’t just odd, annoying, unreasonable, and obsessive, but that he really did have some psychological problems worth noting and treating.

The simple fact of the matter is that not only is “crazy” so much more than a word that could mean mental illness, but it’s usually *not* used that way. In fact...and here's the kicker...we never politely use that word to describe a truly mentally ill person. Even my friend with the crazy ex-boyfriend uses that term to describe him as she knew him during the relationship, when he drove her crazy with his bizarre attitudes and behavior, and not his current diagnosis of psychological problems.

Which brings us to another issue: maybe sometimes a person acts "crazy" because they actually are mentally ill...sometimes. And sometimes they're odd, unusual, unorthodox, outrageous, senseless, obsessive, bizarre, and have very strange ideas well within the range of of what we consider sanity.

And, linguistically, to say that it always means and has to refer to mental illness is…well…crazy.