Who's Calling Me Crazy? A guest post by Dr Kimberley McMahon-Coleman.

 Madam Bipolar and I went to school together an undisclosed number of years ago, in a place called Lithgow. “Lithgow” can be used in a sentence in much the same way as Santana uses “Old Lima Heights” in Glee: “you can’t scare me, I’m from Lithgow” or “You’d better stop that, or I’ll go all Lithgow on you.” One thing you may not know about Lithgow, though, is that one you’re accepted there, you’re really accepted. In hindsight, there were 3 of us in our year 12 with pretty strong Asperger’s traits, but no one was reading much of Lorna Wing at the time and the intelligence and quirkiness were respected, rather than ridiculed, so it went largely unnoticed. 

My current job involves teaching Uni students the academic language and literacies they need to succeed. The students who are “triaged” to me are those registered with Disability Services, while my colleagues with ESL backgrounds take the international students, and so on. I see a pretty varied range of so-called “difference,” but most “disabilities” these days are invisible: specifically, mental health disorder and Asperger’s Syndrome. I’m often asked to what extent the diagnosis impacts on my teaching methods and the answer is, not much. Obviously if a student discloses that they have Asperger’s I’m going to reduce the metaphor to plain language quotient, or if s/he is dealing with anxiety I’m not going to add to the pressure by demanding prompt answers, deep self-analysis and extra homework. But you teach people, not symptoms. 

The research part of my job is closely related to popular culture, which is cool because I can go around quoting Glee on company time, but it also means I have to spend a lot of time explaining what on earth it has to do with my teaching. I’m looking at mental health, mental illness and mental disorders in popular culture, and the probable impact on the identity formation of adolescent viewers. It’s a link that’s not immediately obvious to everyone, but if you watch enough episodes of Buffy (and that was one of the ‘good’ shows which made an attempt to look at difference in a sensitive manner!), you realise how often words like “crazy,” “spaz” and “insane” are bandied about. It then becomes hard to argue that a teen watching it won’t internalise that message that the only way to be is 100% mentally healthy, all the time. 

I’m not sure who exactly is supposed to achieve this lofty standard (even Buffy didn’t manage it, and she was the Chosen One), but teens who believe the message that they are somehow deficient because there’s a bit of a misfire in one section of the brain sometimes grow up to be Uni students , and typically under-confident ones at that who (hopefully) eventually end up in my office.

So that’s the context. Now here’s what I don’t get: we know that nobody’s perfect. We know that 1 in 5 Australians will suffer from some form mental illness in their lifetimes, most likely anxiety and depression (I’m among that number, by the way. Does it make you judge me differently?). We know that 14% of children and adolescents will suffer from anxiety and/or depression (Mindframe National Media Initiative).  We know that people with “disabilities,” a word which is now used almost interchangeably with “diagnoses”—physical, mental, emotional—can be and are functioning members of society. My husband is one. Madam Bipolar is another. So surely there must come a time when the language we use reflects this, and is applied with equal thought across the spectrum of difference. I mean, you don’t hear people talking about “crips” anymore, but “retards” comes up in Facebook memes.

This post arose after I read an Amazon review, my head exploded, and I contacted Madam Bipolar to have a wee rant. Basically, I reviewed a book and then someone associated with said book decided to review my review, and me. At one point he addressed me as “Lady,” which perplexed me, because I couldn’t work out if he thought I was a cartoon dog or if he thought he was a ‘40s gangster in the Bronx. But the real kicker was his assertion that he thought it was time I changed my medication. 

I’m sure it was meant to be personally insulting. I was supposed to internalise the intended slur that I was crazy, and go off and cry about it. Boy, did he pick the wrong target. I work with the so-called “crazy” students every day, only I just call them students. I respect them for what they can do.  Some of them overcome some really big hurdles to complete their studies, and not of the “my printer wouldn’t work” or “I lost my USB” variety, either. I don’t see it as an insult to be like a group of people who are very determined to work through and past circumstances beyond their own control. You see, there are members of my family with heart disease, bipolar disorder, diabetes and asthma. Both of my parents-in-law are cancer survivors, and so am I.  That tends to give you some clarity about the things you can control and the things you can’t, and it’s made us all pretty pro-medication, what with it having kept us alive and functional and all. Medication is something you take under supervision because you’re being responsible and proactive; it’s not a sign of weakness. As for why chemical imbalances in the brain are somehow coded as being much less desirable and much more scary than chemical imbalances in ovaries or pancreases, or electrical irregularities in the heart or whatever, I just don’t get it. Sure, psychosis is scary to witness, but no more so than, say, being first responder to someone having a heart attack. 

So in the end I went a little bit Lithgow on the unconstructed reviewer. I politely contacted Amazon and they quickly removed his comments. But the incident did make me think. I’ve become more aware of how often I say that something is “driving me crazy,” for example. I think we all need to strip these words of their latent power by being more aware of when and how we use them, and the impact they have. Not because it is politically correct to do so, but because language is a really powerful tool, so we have a responsibility to be aware of how we’re wielding it.

What do you think? Is it “crazy” to think that we shouldn’t view words like “crazy” as benign?

Dr Kimberley McMahon-Coleman is a recovering high school educator who now teaches in Learning Development at the University of Wollongong. She has contributed to a number of books including Glee and Teen Culture (Forthcoming), Fanpires: Audience Consumption of the Modern Vampire (2011) and Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture (Forthcoming). With Dr Roslyn Weaver from the University of Western  Sydney she has written Werewolves and Other Shapeshifters in Popular Culture: A Thematic Analysis of Recent Depictions (McFarland, 2012). The book focuses on the figure of the shapeshifter in literature and popular culture, and how it is used as a metaphor for difference. This marks a return to her early interest in vampires, werewolves and other things which Mulder might have investigated. She can be found in cyberspace at http://shapeshiftersinpopularculture.wordpress.com and on Twitter @KMcMahonColeman.