Comments on: watchful words: 7 ways to rename a mental illness

By: isabella mori

isabella mori — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 22:53:33 +0000

sometimes i don’t have the heart to remove spam comments. “tender thanks” – isn’t that nice?
isabella mori´s last blog ..be the change: how meditation can transform you and the world

By: ValfPyday

ValfPyday — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 22:16:03 +0000

Tender thanks you championing details. It helped me in my task

By: David Garnet

David Garnet — Sun, 13 May 2007 16:36:12 +0000

It’s true what you write. These “official” labels for what are often just particular behaviors can also end up emphasizing them, giving them weight and validity, rather than compassionately guiding the behavior toward balance and health.

By: ddrucker

ddrucker — Sun, 13 May 2007 05:10:55 +0000

Yes, I suppose the description of an experience has a lot of power: it can hide things we prefer not to talk about, reduce people’s experiences to a generic (inhuman)textbook description, sidestep the social stigma attached to them, or is there another case: redefine what’s normal?

I keep thinking of (another one of those Pandora’s box items, maybe?)’What’s Normal’,

Society is so dependent on language, and society determines normalcy. Leaving aside the stickier questions of genius and insanity, I was thinking of those great stories by Oliver Sacks of some of his fascinating patients from ‘The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat’ and ‘An Anthropologist on Mars’, as well as the even more controversial ideas from ‘The Island of the Colorblind’, which talks about the Pacific Island of Pingelap, where a quirk of genes of the population has produced a society in which color blindness is normal. Wow. I guess there, the ability to see color might almost be treated as a kind of hallucination!

By: isabella mori

isabella mori — Sun, 13 May 2007 03:23:43 +0000

i opened all sorts of pandora’s boxes with this post, and thanks for pointing to one of them – political correctness.

political correctness in its more unpleasant form is nothing but an orwellian cloak for what-shall-not-be-talked-about, reminiscent of victorian “unmentionables”.

at any rate, what i am trying to point towards here is not some watering-down or covering-up but simply an encouragement to use, on occasion at least, words that are more human (as george carlin points out) and more descriptive of a unique person’s unique experience.

By: ddrucker

ddrucker — Sun, 13 May 2007 01:58:45 +0000

It’s interesting that the change in language that you are viewing as helpful was also the subject of a comedy routine by George Carlin. He bemoaned the changes in the terms that describe the state of someone mentally affected by the events of the battlefield; In the World Wars, it was called ‘Shell-Shock’. In the US/Korean war it was ‘Battle Fatigue’. Now, he complains bitterly, it’s a term ‘drained of all humanity’: ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome’

Although it is interesting to ponder how the rewording of an affliction or condition can result in a different attitude toward it (for better or for worse), I’m reminded of all of those ‘x’-challenged people, when that sort of language quickly became a sure-fire joke about Political Correctness: He’s not deaf, he’s ‘Hearing Challenged’, she’s not short, she’s ‘Height Challenged’. Finally, it was They’re not Dead, they’re ‘metabolically challenged.’

By: Scott

Scott — Sat, 12 May 2007 00:00:59 +0000

At one of the many mental illness sites I used to visit, we used to use the word “Krazee.” Like, “I took my Krazee pills yesterday.”

We loved it. It took away the sting of all the other words we got called, like “insane,” “sick” and of course, “crazy.”

However, Crazyboards.org has absolutely the best and funniest descriptions of mental illnesses that I have seen. Be warned, they are pretty offensive though.