Generally speaking, I try to avoid using the word crazy to mean “bizarrely wrong.” It wasn’t always so, but after years of online discussions with people smarter than I am, I’ve come to the conclusion that that usage of the word reinforces negative stereotypes about people suffering from mental health issues. As a person who suffers from my own share of mental health issues (depression and ADHD, plus a grab-bag assortment of behavioral issues related to those two), I should be the last person perpetuating the myth that being mentally ill is a moral failing. Being mentally ill is like having cancer — it’s probably not your fault, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Unlike, say, hoping God smites Barack Obama with brain cancer and sends him to Hell. In earlier years, I might have called Pastor Steven Anderson crazy. But he isn’t crazy. Just evil.
But while I have decided that I’m not going to use crazy to mean evil, I still intend to use crazy when I mean to describe someone as, well, crazy. After all, some people are crazy.
Take Michele Bachmann. Please. Because Rep. Bachmann, R-We There Yet, is crazy.
I don’t mean she holds a lot of bizarre right-wing views, though she most certainly does. But holding bizarre right-wing views doesn’t make one crazy. That falls more into the “evil” category, and I’m only too happy to talk about them as such.
No, I mean Michele Bachmann is crazy. She has serious, deap-seated, untreated mental health issues that are deeply affecting her ability to carry out her job.
Last night’s speech in Colorado is a fine example. Bachmann, as could be expected, spoke out against health care, using rather typical Republican rhetoric:
“Something is way crazy out there,” Bachmann said in her remarks, billed as a “personal legislative briefing” by the Golden-based Independence Institute, which bills itself as a “free market think tank.”
“This is slavery,” Bachmann said after claiming many Americans pay half their income to taxes. “It’s nothing more than slavery.”
In a speech filled with urgent and violent rhetoric, Bachmann — who proudly acknowledges she is the country’s “second-most hated Republican woman,” behind only former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin – drew a clear line on health care reform.
“You’re either for us or against us on this issue,” she said after deriding U.S. Rep. Betsy Markey, a Fort Collins Democrat, for “[sitting] on the fence” about health care proposals at recent town halls.
Okay, well, that’s overheated and over-the-top. But it isn’t crazy. Sadly, it’s only slightly to the right of mainstream, right-wing discourse on health care these days.
No, crazy is this:
“This cannot pass,” the Minnesota Republican told a crowd at a Denver gathering sponsored by the Independence Institute. “What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn’t pass.”
That’s crazy. As in completely disconnected from reality crazy.
Now, I don’t know if Michele Bachmann meant to call for mass suicide to stop health care reform; I frankly don’t know what exactly she was trying to say. I do know that, from calling on Americans to rise up against tyrrany to declaring that health care reform will be defeated “on our knees in prayer and fasting,” Bachmann is reaching new, messianic heights in her rhetoric, and slipping the surly bonds of sanity in the process.
I mean this sincerely: I believe Michele Bachmann is mentally ill. She’s certainly demonstrated a strong paranoid streak, including this charming anecdote from her time as a state senator:
Bachmann said both women stood in front of the bathroom door and then one woman put her hand on top of the door and her other hand on the door handle and leaned her body weight toward the door to hold it shut. The other woman put her hand on the door as well. … [Bachmann said she] was absolutely terrified and has never been that terrorized before as she had no idea what those two women were going to do to her.
These were not just women, of course, but lesbian women. (The complaint was dropped, as there was no evidence anybody had done anything but talk to Bachmann.)
And of course, who could forget this classic:
Michele Bachmann has a mean streak.
On May 6, 2006, the day she was endorsed by the Sixth District Republican Party for the nomination to become a U.S. Representative, she threatened to retaliate against a woman who had opposed her nomination.
“You will pay, you will pay,” Bachmann said to the woman in front of a dozen or more witnesses. The woman grew increasingly upset at the non-specific threat and demanded to know how Bachmann was going to make her pay. She didn’t get an answer. But Bachmann, continued to repeat “you will pay” until the woman was led away from the incident, in tears, by her husband.
I witnessed the confrontation myself. It was in the lobby of Monticello High School, just outside the auditorium where the delegates were in the process of endorsing Bachmann.
Quite simply, Michele Bachmann is not sane. She’s able to function in society because her insanity has been channeled into service to conservative politics, but that doesn’t mean that she’s well.
Unfortunately, rather than living in a society where this sort of behavior would lead to one’s loved ones suggesting counseling, and perhaps a psychopharmacological agent, Bachmann lives in a society where Republican politicians claim with a straight face that a provision in a health care plan to give people control over end-of-life decisions will lead inexorably to death panels. Yes, most of the Republicans know they’re lying. But Bachmann doesn’t. She believes it, with the white-hot fervor of a true believer.
I am concerned about where Bachmann is heading. She has come awfully close to calling directly for violence against Democrats, and I have a feeling that at some point, she will. Not out of malice, exactly — but because she doesn’t really seem to understand that her words have consequences. I’d pity her, except she’s got a say in how the country runs.
Ultimately, I don’t wish ill on Michele Bachmann. I’d like to see her get help, and get stable, and heck, maybe even become an effective legislator. But until she does, her behavior and her words will get more and more bizarre. And there will be at least one politician in America who I can say, without judgment or anger, is crazy. Oh, she’s evil, too. But that’s something separate entirely.
Uh, Jeff, I don’t think is going to be taken as a good use of “crazy” either.
(1) One should never try to diagnose others without both having an MD and seeing them in person (Bill Frist failing the second requirement when he diagnosed Terri Schiavo via video).
(2) You’re still taking eccentric behavior and turns of phrase that you seem to willfully misunderstand as signs of mental illness. I don’t like what she does and says, therefore she’s crazy.
(3) Regarding the willful misunderstanding:
I am surprised that you seem to have lived many years in the West without becoming familiar with the trope of “mixing blood” in order demonstrate solidarity and commitment. The last place I saw this was in the Best Vampire Movie Ever (“Let the Right One In”), but it’s pretty pervasive outside Sweden too: it happens in Tom Sawyer, it’s cliched enough to have a Wikipedia entry. Bachmann isn’t talking about suicide at all. She is quite clearly saying that she wants all of the opponents of reform to band together loyally and make a stand. (It was actually a conservative blogger who was the first I saw to point out that saying “It shall not pass” over and over doesn’t make you Gandalf.)
Actually I think the use of the word crazy is more offensive with the disclaimer. Assuming that because someone makes statements you disagree with (and heck, I disagree with and probably 99% of the people who’ll read this entry disagree with) must have a mental disorder is pretty offensive in my book.
If you’d left out the disclaimer, at least we could take the charitable view of the article that you’re not literally saying that, you’re just using the word in the figurative sense. As you note that is not without problems, but still better than making the “don’t agree with me = something mentally wrong with you” equation you have. That’s Fox News territory.
Being mentally ill is like having cancer — it’s probably not your fault, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of.
It’s clear from what you’ve written that in spite of your conversations with people you claim to consider smarter than yourself (I suspect ‘smarter’ to be a code word), you still are not convinced by the above argument.
I’m sure you experience with depression informs this too.
I think you should explore this more and not bail out because it might be harder to express than the view you’re trying to accept.
No account cowboy: Jeff is saying that Bachmann crossed a line between sanity and insanity when she proposes that anti-healthcare militants slit their wrists. He believes that such talk is not merely evil, it’s actually a symptom of real, severe mental illness.
I disagree: I think it was colorful language taken from the “blood brothers” ritual. I thought you were supposed to cut your hand, not your wrist, though. That could be extremely dangerous.
But I take issue about where Michele Bachmann’s evil ideology is not necessarily crazy. I think that the radical Right is insane. Clinically. I think they’re paranoid psychopaths who have no concern for the feelings or welfare of others. I think they have a tenuous relationship with reality. You cannot believe the things they believe without having a deep-seated hatred for humanity and severe perceptual and cognitive disabilities.
It’s not a matter with “disagreeing” with them. Their policy proposals reveal a worldview of someone who is intellectually impaired and emotionally disturbed. You don’t just “disagree” with the ravings of lunatics on streetcorners. You reject the entire twisted, distorted version of reality that their politics are based on.
It’s disturbing to consider that the entire underpinning of one of the major parties is real, actual, mental illness. By which I mean the total inability to recognize or care about the suffering of others, and the difficulty to deal with the real world, preferring to indulge in lurid, paranoid fantasy.
jasperjava,
I am sure many of the people on the far-right are capable of caring about others’ suffering. After all, these folks are convinced that charity can take care of everything and there’s no need for government to step in. People can always bake-sale their way to that operation.
They care about others’ suffering — it just has to be others who aren’t too Other.
I think the objection to the “slitting wrists” comment is that usually, in my experience, “blood brothers” involves cutting one’s finger or palm. Wrist-slitting is, in the US anyway, fairly universally understood as a suicide gesture.
Perhaps Rep. Bachman was… confused.
On the subject of the distinctions we draw around the social construction of mental illness, some information from a lecture I give to students on multicultural therapy.
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E. Franklin Frazier, an African-American social worker in the 1920s, identified patterns of delusional thinking among racist whites (persistent beliefs even in the face of contradictory facts, such as the belief that black had higher rates of syphillis even after being shown epidemiological date that contradicted the belief), as well as Freudian defense mechanisms, psychological projections, and even hallucinations (e.g. describing suspicious or odd behaviors by blacks who were acting normally) that supported their racism. He saw race prejudice as “an acquired psychological reaction,” perhaps similar to our understanding now of PTSD, a form of mental illness that is acquired rather than innate or physiological.
After publishing “The Pathology of Race Prejudice” in 1927, he was dismissed as the chair of the Atlanta University School of Social Work, and fled the city with a gun for protection from a white lynch mob. His work in this area has been largely ignored.
Other black psychologists have tried to advocate for including a diagnosis in the DSM that describes racist delusions but have been excluded from the DSM development task forces, which was justified at the time of Revision III by saying they had addressed diversity by including women. Racist Personality Disorder still hasn’t made it into the DSM.
——-
Building on Frazier’s work, I wonder what a disciplined investigation into the beliefs of Bachman and her enthusiasts would find. Persistent beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence? Paranoid delusions? Defense mechanisms like denial, splitting, displacement, distortions? Hallucinations that support their belief structure (“He’s an Arab!” “We haven’t seen the birth certificate!”)
As a mental health professional, and someone with a DSM diagnosis myself, I am incredibly skeptical of the arbitrary, socially-constructed way that divisions have been drawn between “ill” and “normal” behaviors. If I were writing the DSM, it’s possible that the level of distorted thinking that Bachman and others show would be considered “crazy.”
Elusis,
If she’d just said “slit our wrists,” I’d also assume that she was making a suicide reference, but she explicitly says “be blood brothers.” Not much room for confusion there.
As for diagnosing someone as “crazy” based on “Persistent beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence,” that would absorb quite a few people on both sides of the aisle. Rosie O’Donnell, for example. So long as you believe that powerful people can manufacture false “evidence” — not, in itself, an irrational belief, given that powerful people have done just that in the past — there’s no reason to assume that what others deem “contradictory evidence” actually settles the matter.
I do appreciate that Bachmann has become synonymous with kooky ideas, though: the following is a comment left to a Washington Post blog where conservative Ramesh Ponnuru tries to explain away the sentiments expressed in the master’s thesis of the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia:
“You are allowed to hold any positions that you want. The problem for McDonnell is not that he hates gays, dislikes women working, and also does not care for senior members of his party: Ensign, Sanford and Vitter (fornicators). It is that he is trying to present a more moderate image to the voting public. He needs at least working women and fornicators to get elected. He can probably skip the gays. He wants independents to see him as practical and level headed. He does not have to let out his inner Bachmann until elected.”
Just keep it simple, folks. “Sick idiots” are simply “sick idiots”! This woman is beyond help. Her hatred has carried her too far. Unfortunately, it’s carried her much too far into the arms of the extreme right wing, which embraces her hatred and tries, so hard, and exhausts itself at the same time, to try to gamble on the American public’s ignorance and stupidity. . The right wing tries to put “power” behind pure ignorance, just as it would embrace everything else that “SEEMS” good for people. Their “power” is the pure distortion of the truth!
To top it off, the right wing distorts everything that is grotesque and everything that is a lie – then puts it out there to the American people to chew on it – those good-hearted, honest American people, and “IT” distorts the truth and begs to bring adversity and hatred amongst ourselves – anything, at all, that will cause division, and dissent – ANYTHING, to cause fighting amongst ourselves – all in the name of “God!”. These are pure lies, expounded to get all of us worked up into a hateful froth that will eventually bring this blatant hatred and disruption out onto the American streets and out in the open.
What the eventual results they hope to obtain are going to be put to the ultimate test! Do WE believe THEIR distortions and LIES, or, are WE going to grind these evil charlatans back into the dirt that they came from?
I, personally, am sick and tired of hearing about cowards like her. I hope she gets what is coming to her! I have no remorse, I have no sympathy. I’m simply looking the devil in it’s mouth and calling it what it truly is! An evil coward! “She” can go back into the darkness from which “she” came from.
If you happen to care to look up right-wing politics, in your dictionary, in your encyclopedia, or on the internet, you will find that these vacuous people go right for the jugular. They don’t mess around. Their expertise is to distort and “deny facts” about everything – about daily living, about how you take care of your own family, about what you choose to believe. Face it, America! This is the “NEW FACE” of evil. It will bring this country down if it’s allowed to continue. Call me an alarmist! Call me something worse – as you right-wing idiots would choose to do (pick your words out of the obscene dictionaries you keep in your simple minds) – it ALL adds up to the same thing! You narrow-minded “people” will ultimately be singled out, you WILL be confronted. you WILL be discounted, and you WILL be destroyed in the name of everything that is good and righteous.
What a mess this country is in…God help us all – not just the people in this country, but everyone in this world!
No, it’s a belief that I think has a few millenia of support behind it that one should “Teach a Man to Fish” and not just “Give a Man a Fish”.
What’s pathological about it is that there are people who will simply never be able to fish, period, no matter how much they are taught. And those people need a fish, not continued lectures on fishing.
The irony about the present GOP is that they are so head-up-@ss about Christianity and “America Is A Christian Nation” that they neglected to notice that Jesus was all about handing out fish to the multitudes, even if he had to do a bit of a (alleged) miracle. If the GOP lived their own supposed Christian values, this would be a Socialist country. Mostly on account of Jesus was a major Socialist — free food, free health care, free educational speeches on the sides of mountains.
If Jesus can heal the sick without charging money, how come the United States of Jesus can’t do likewise?
I found the conflation of “slit our wrists” and “blood brothers” confusing, personally. I wasn’t sure if she was saying “we could do X (slit our wrists) or Y (become blood brothers),” or if she was saying “X leads to Y” (we can make blood brothers by cutting ourselves on our wrists) or if there was some ominous connection between literal X and metaphorical Y (we should make gestures of suicide en masse to show that we are bound together in our very serious opposition to this abominable thing) or what.
It is, at a minimum, a rather bad mashup of two very different cultural images.
Which does not qualify a person as mentally incompetent (says she who wound up talking about the structure of a therapy session in terms of going to a sushi bar with a conveyor belt the other day in class).
I would agree with you that conspiracy beliefs about 9-11 in the face of pretty overwhelming evidence are pretty concerning to me in terms of whether the belief-holder is connected to the reality-based community (and I’m really baffled about Whoopi Goldberg’s recent comment about the moon landing). In the days after the attacks, I was pretty open to a wide variety of explanations, but over time the evidence has lent a preponderance of weight to the public version of events. I realize that a lack of faith in those with great political or financial power might make those public versions harder to trust. But in Bachman’s case, and for that matter the cases of all kinds of people going on about “death panels” and so forth, it seems that their beliefs are easy to contradict with verifiable evidence – does HB 3200 say anything about deciding who lives and dies? No it clearly does not.
So far as I’m concerned, there’s reason for me to have some skepticism about both O’Donnell’s and Bachman’s grip on reality. But every piece of an assessment needs to be put into a context. I haven’t sufficient context (first and foremost, having not met or assessed either of them) to make a clinical judgment.
My point was simply that there are a variety of ways of being that, looked at one way, are just part of human variation (“yes yes, it’s all a rich tapestry”) and looked at another way, meet exactly the same kinds of criteria as ways of being that the psychiatry world has agreed to include under the umbrella of “mentally ill.” The veil between the two is not just thin, it is in fact rather arbitrary and with no small amount of political implication.