Woman with a shirt that reads, “Mental Health Matters.”

Photo by Matthew Ball on Unsplash

“My spirit’s broke,
“My mind’s a joke,
“And getting up’s real hard” (lyric from Come Back to Us Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard by John Prine)

Like many pastors, much of my work through over forty years of ministry involved caring for people who lived with a mental illness. Every congregation has many participants who have been diagnosed with chronic mental health issues or live with loved ones who have. Those living with mental illness invest enormous amounts of energy in daily tasks most people take for granted. To go into the world to meet a friend or apply for a job or attend church requires painful exposures to everyone they meet that something is not quite right with their thought processing. It is akin to walking around naked or with our medications written large and taped to our chests for all the world to see. Privacy is impossible.

When they venture out to virtually anywhere or watch TV or listen to conversations, they risk suffering a huge disturbance in their emotional or psychological wellbeing. These disturbances are made more likely by our culture’s insensitivity to people living with mental illness. Evidently it is still okay to exploit those living with brain chemistry issues. 

People living with mental illness have to ride by places with signs that read, “Insane Auto Stereo” “Crazy Al’s Low, Low Prices” and “My Prices are so Cheap, I Ought to Have My Head Examined.” Using disabilities as descriptions of behavior is not restricted to mental illness. People are classified as “lame” if they don’t seem particularly clever in the eyes of the beholder.  They are said to be “blind” if they don’t seem aware of important information about themselves or others. Similarly, they are called deaf if they don’t respond to information in the way the communicator feels they should. I’m not sure how those who really can’t walk, see, or hear feel when they hear people use their challenges as adjectives for people who can walk, see, and hear.  However, I am quite sure that people living with mental illness find the comical use of their challenge insulting.

When people living with mental illness go to the movies, no matter how careful they are to research the subject matter beforehand, they have to endure a few previews in which the images convey a story of someone who is mentally ill and therefore a “vicious danger” to their community. Or, they have to try to maintain their psychological balance while being pummeled by trailers with terrifying creatures that delight theater audiences whose undiagnosed mental health issues cause them to lap up films about demonic, cruel, savage characters.

Those same previews are scattered throughout otherwise benign TV shows which make watching even silly sitcoms or sports treacherous. Ad campaigns regularly use frightening, bizarre or unsettling images to attract attention. Such campaigns make it impossible for some with mental health issues to even stay in the room. (This year’s Super Bowl ran numerous commercials for Tubi TV that featured an oversized rabbit that kept coming up from behind people and tapping them on the shoulder. Maybe not rabbits, but figures doing just that are recurring nightmares for people living with mental illness).

Even when a movie or TV show does not feature bloodthirsty, oversexed, unhinged stereotypes of mental illness, it will often include dozens of pejorative statements about people living with confusing brain malfunctions. I promise you once you start seeing it, you won’t watch an entire movie of any type without seeing the comedy or drama “enhanced” with an insulting reference to mental illness. My grandchildren and I were watching the beloved animated film, Madagascar, when, in search of a cheap laugh, the writers had the zebra refer to another character as “psychotic.” Ha ha ha.

Our conversational patterns are the most ubiquitous source of mocking references to those living with mental illness. I encourage you to listen for the number of times you hear or say that someone is “crazy,” “nuts,” “insane,” “mental” (for our British readers), “psychotic,” “schizo,” “lost their marbles,” “went psycho,” or “needs to be committed” to name only a handful of culturally acceptable, negative references to mental illness. 

Many negative references remain in our common discourse about race, gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, religious practice, and a host of other categories of human experience. The difference is, when used in public forums, the transgressor will be fired or politically maligned or cancelled or publicly shamed for using them. In contrast, commentators, politicians, preachers, and celebrities of all kinds can pepper their conversation with pejorative references to those who live with mental illness without consequence.

What is to be done about this? We could try to substitute better adjectives for behavioral patterns we find to be mystifying or infuriating rather than use euphemisms for mental illness. Here are some possibilities: irrational, unpredictable, silly, ill-advised, inconsistent, foolish, confused, an overreaction, nonsensical, dangerous, perplexing, outlandish, out of proportion, strange, odd, unexpected, or weird. These words and phrases, and a thousand more, are descriptions that fit all of us from time to time. When we use them, those living with mental illness hear us owning our commonality with them rather than using their condition to separate ourselves from them. What else can we do? I’m not sure. The problem is so widespread and deeply ingrained, we probably have to live with a lot of it. Maybe we can start by simply agreeing that mocking those living with mental illness and mental illness itself is no longer okay.