Crazy offensive?

[Phoebe]

At one point I had heard people objecting to the word 'crazy' on the grounds that it was unfair/rude to mentally ill people and tended to obfuscate important things related to the identification of mental illness. Is this still the case, however? The word seems to have a much more expansive meaning and sometimes even a positive meaning. Example that made me think of this: Cardi refers to herself as too crazy for some guy, though I assume she means that he needs someone who is exactly that type of crazy, wherein the crazy is a good thing for all concerned. And crazy is used as a modifying adjective for all sorts of other good things as well, including good itself.

The point is I'm reluctant to give up such a useful word that I also happen to use all the time, given that I don't think its meaning is primarily one of rudeness to the mentally ill. However, there are many other situations where I do abandon words that seem primarily offensive and little value outside of something rude is being obtained. So if someone thinks this is one of those cases I would like to hear it.

By contrast this is something that does offend me - not much because it's highly impersonal and who cares, really. But it does contribute to an overall misunderstanding of OCD that is extremely common and I'm surprised that researchers would perpetuate it. Then again you might be shocked that most psychology researchers and practitioners don't even grasp that ERP is The Treatment for OCD, the only one that actually addresses the faulty mechanism as opposed to merely trying to chill people out overall. So maybe it shouldn't surprise me that people who are supposed to be experts could perpetuate misunderstandings.

Anyway the misunderstanding is the repeated suggestion, including in research, that many people are now engaging in OCD or OCD-like behaviors post-2016 election, when they supposedly obsessively check the news or play on their phones so that they can keep apprised of the latest outrage. No, I'm sorry, that's not OCD or even OCD-like. Perhaps somewhere out there, a person is spending an hour flipping switches in her bathroom, or counting things repeatedly like an incantation against the devil, or washing her hands, or selecting exactly the right words, or clawing the skin systematically off her body, because she's worried about things going wrong in our political landscape and doesn't want them to go further wrong. Or maybe she really is compulsively checking her phone due to obsessions about politics, but not because the President posts every 4 hours something crazy on Twitter (this is one of the non-controversial uses of the term), or because her news feed is giving her some new content that she, as a rational person, wishes to investigate further and be apprised of. Rather, the person with OCD checks because e.g. she can't put the phone down for fear that failure to do so will lead to a catastrophe of some sort, or maybe she experiences overwhelming anxiety upon being forced to abandon her phone checking. The active monitoring of the daily news is not a ritualistic behavior that most people feel compelled to do as an obsession in this way, even if they feel anxiety about the things that they are reading.

Likewise, feeling increased anxiety about the content of news is not what it means to feel OCD anxiety. There is something called generalized anxiety disorder that would more appropriately describe people who really do feel overwhelmed by anxiety due to stressful things going on in the world, and then they could be treated accordingly. Such people are not trying on any level to self-soothe by ritualistically checking their newsfeed; quite the opposite, if anything.

But now we have a language that permits people to describe themselves as having OCD or developing OCD because they find themselves regularly worried about the political State of Affairs in 2018 America. This isn't particularly fruitful or helpful, either to those people or to people who suffer from OCD. My friend who compulsively bakes in response to what she reads in the news is probably coming closer to having OCD-like behavior than anyone else who is describing themselves this way now, except that she doesn't feel her anxiety surge upon being extracted from her kitchen.

Annnnyway, more tl;dr fueled by scrupulosity concerns about language, lol! That's a joke.

[bralbovsky]

Don't get hysterical.

or, that's hysterical, that you think lay people will actually correctly diagnose and describe syndromes professionals often can't agree on.

We have a long history of it, from hysteria to split personality, to whatever we're tamping down with the drug du jour.

Not to mention most folks' carelessness with language in general, which, sorry, I just mentioned.
English is so bipolar, it sets off my OCD.

[Phoebe]

LOL, yes. Yes. Here is a good account of it: