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Living with mental illness can be exhausting: remembering your medications, monitoring your symptoms, going to doctor’s appointments. It can also be disheartening to live with symptoms, to experience bouts of depression or anxiety and to feel like you may never get better. But sometimes the hardest thing about living with mental illness is the way that so-called healthy people treat you and speak about you. They are my biggest pet peeves about living with mental illness.

Calling People “Crazy”

We know, some people seem “crazy.” Their behavior is erratic. You don’t understand why they do the things they do. There may indeed be people that are irrational and a little “off” for whom there is no explanation for their behavior. Or people who are, as the dictionary definition states, deranged or demented. Then there are people living with mental illness, who might seem irrational at times, but get painted with the crazy brush. Statistically speaking, we’re not demented or certifiable; we’re mostly living our lives just like everyone else with little evidence of our disorder. So please stop calling us crazy, and stop calling other people crazy until you know their situation. Cary-cray might not be all that good a substituted either. I’ll let you keep using that word for Donald Trump, though.

Using “Depressed” as a Casual Term

Lots of people claim to be depressed, and use that word to describe their condition when they just mean that they’re very sad. People who used “depressed” in this context probably have a reason for their profound sadness. Maybe the loss of a job or a loved one. But depression and sadness have little to do with each other. Yes, depression does contain a component of sadness and tearfullness. But usually there is no reason for the feeling, and it persists for weeks and months along with physiological symptoms like sleep disturbance and changes in appetite. Maybe people can brush up on their vocabulary and say “I’m unspeakably sad” or “I’m devastated” instead of using depression in the wrong context.

Saying that Living with Mental Illness is Simple

OK, maybe nobody says outright that living with mental illness is easy, but they imply that belief when they say things like “it’s mind over matter” and “just try harder” or “you just have to pray.” Those phrases are dismissive and ignorant of the fact that some mental illnesses are physiological disorders that start in the brain. For example, it has been shown that the brains of people with bipolar actually respond differently to stimuli than people without the disease. Just like people with diabetes have a pancreas that responds differently to sugar and insulin than those without that disease. You can’t wish or will away mental illness any more than you can do so with diabetes or a heart condition. People believe that just because something is in your brain that it is just in your mind and, therefore, simple to overcome.

Of course I have many more pet peeves about living with mental illness. Like getting my insurance company to approve my medications or the shortage of psychiatrists in New York City. But those are systemic issues that would take more than an article to discuss and change. But hopefully pointing out some small changes we can all make in our language and behavior can make life a little more calm for those of us living with mental illness.

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