Metaphorical use of terms for mental disorders/illnesses

This BBC article interested me: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15213824

It's about the increasingly metaphorical use of terms for disorders such as schizophrenic and OCD. Are such uses trivialising the illnesses, thus perpetuating negative stereotypes, ill-informed fear (I almost said "paranoia" there; the irony of that is delicious) and self diagnoses, leading to increased stigma?

Or is that idea just Political Correctness Gone Mad from people who need thicker skins, bigger spines etc and to accept the colloquial usage of the word is every bit as legitimate as the clinical?

Personally, I tend towards the former. It's definitely good that people are at least talking about the conditions - 5 years ago very few people knew OCD even existed - but there's still a massive amount of stigma that can become worse when people mistake genuine cases for faking it.

This is especially the case with spectrum disorders, like Aspergers. I have it, diagnosed, but I'm high-functioning. My social skills are always said to be higher even than others with a low-level of the condition, which is a result of me managing to overcome it to some degree (and my mental health nurse mother not telling me I had it until I was 21, despite realising when I was three, but that's a different story). But the fact that I can cope, albeit not as well as most neuro-typicals, in social situations and life in general doesn't mean it's not there and that it doesn't affect me. But talking about it, particularly online, will often almost immediately bring accusations of being just another fake shy internet fiend who thinks he has it (for what it's worth, I've never bought into the "Aspie Pride" thing and am somewhat controversial in that I consider myself cursed and that my single greatest wish is that I could be cured). But I'm getting side-tracked.

Point is, when such stigma exists, No Such Thing as Bad Publicity doesn't necessarily apply, at least in the short term. One could argue that in the longer term, people eventually will stop fucking about and good will come of people having spoken about the conditions in the mainstream at all.

Still, it makes me...uncomfortable, to think of serious conditions being used as celebrity buzzwords, rather like faddish pseudo-bisexuality has been treated in recent years by some celebrties.

Thoughts?

Considering that there is no cure for Asperger's and that you're high-functioning... Wouldn't your greatest wish be more productively spent elsewhere?

I'm not sure.

On the one hand, the misuse of terms like "OCD" and "bipolar" leads to annoying misconceptions and I can understand it being irritating from the perspective of people who genuinely suffer from them; it also furthers the euphemism treadmill which is far too much effort to keep up with a lot of the time, and can lead to some pretty absurd constructions ("handy-capable"?).

On the other hand, some medical terms, like "paranoid" and "depressed", are so thoroughly ingrained into our colloquial vocabularies that fighting against their use seems rather draconian, not to mention futile.

edited 11th Oct '11 5:29:56 PM by BobbyG

I generally don't use them, with an eception of bipolar to decribe something/someone that fits the bill.

Then again I've been around the ideas for awhile now as my brother is ASD.

This always happens. 'Idiot' used to be a medical term, meaning someone with a certain degree of mental retardation. People keep coming up with new words to 'humanize' the illness (for lack of a better term that I can think of) or something, but they still fall to the same place after a period of time, so people come up with a new word, etc. etc.

I mean, I'm the first one to say that using these terms as generic insults is totally gay, Bobby G is right, it's useless to try to fight it.

I don't think "gay" is there yet, and that's a loaded one as well because the very implication that being gay is in some way undesirable is heavily controversial with a high potential for offence.

"Lame" would be a better example, as the derogatory meaning is almost wholly divorced from the condition it originally described at this point.

Well, what about 'retard'? It's a description of a medical condition, but I don't think you're going to get anywhere convincing people to stop using 'retarded' for things they think are stupid.

"Retard", similar deal as with "gay" in that it's still at the point where people are reasonably likely to be be offended by it.

Less politically charged, though, since most would agree that it's a disorder. I think that one will probably go the same way as "idiot", "cretin", "moron", etc. given time.

edited 11th Oct '11 7:10:00 PM by BobbyG

Sometimes, the term applies even if you don't have the disorder. I've never been diagnosed with OCD, but I have been told by a psychologist that I have obsessive-compulsive behavior patterns. (I tried to deny this to myself while walking home, until I realized that I was stepping over every crack in the sidewalk.)

edited 11th Oct '11 9:18:33 PM by feotakahari

I find it strange that people say things like "I am OCD" or "I am ADHD". Nobody ever says "I am bronchial Asthma".

I am John's - shot -

No! No fight club reference! Bad!

Interesting article. I think that a key part of words becoming generic insults is that they were generic to begin with.

Gay, for instance, was a euphemism (+1 to vagueness), and it can be taken to mean anyone in the LGBT community (+1 to vagueness, + 3 to toeyboff). Retard is not a medically accepted term, and again, is vague in that it could cover almost anyone who has difficulty learning, i.e. "is retarded", and again, originated as a type of euphemism.

As words like Cretin and Moron became outmoded and uselessly non-specific, they too became more popular as generic insults, because they started to carry less offensive weight.

So perhaps "Schitz" is popular, and generally considered inoffensive by the young people with their double-step and 'ippity-'op because of a confusion between schizoid personality and schizophrenia.

That is the only word that I am seriously concerned about becoming an insult. "OCD", "throw an epi" and so on will always be held in check by the fact that, sooner-or-later, these brash young people will come across someone who actually struggles with the condition.

So I'm not too worried about this. I do not like it when it does happen, AT ALL, but I do not think that these particular words will become primarily used as insults. Unless modern psychiatry ceases to be relevant, natch, in which case it won't really matter (in the same way as the original meanings of "moron" and "cretin" don't really matter), because we'll think of the original meanings in the same way as we think of the term "hysterical", and the words will no longer apply to anyone who is really real.

Paranoia has been extended to the belief that They(tm) are out to get ya, whether the believer suffers from schizophrenia and is delusional or not. There's no other word to convey the extreme mistrust and/or the tinfoil hat.

edited 12th Oct '11 5:33:42 PM by SavageHeathen

5+ for reference.

Wasn't sure if anyone would catch it but glad and impressed that you did

Regarding paranoia, it's a word that has represented a general madness since Ancient Greek times. So it has been very vague for a very long time, and it was a pre-existing word, albeit in another language, which makes it much more prone to abuse than, say, OCD, in my opinion. It's also not used as an insult very often — I think.

However, you do have a point. It's true, there is cause for fear of certain words losing their meaning to some people and being used in insulting ways while others still see them as meaningful (Schitz was the example I used, paranoid is another good example). And it probably is more of a threat to more words than I made out in my first post in this thread.

Blah I am bad at remembering things from movies well. I thought you were talking about toeyboff though!

edited 12th Oct '11 6:05:06 PM by mmysqueeant

It's actually I am Jack's x.

You mean everybody doesn't do that?

To whoever mentioned it up there - Actually, 'cretin' is an accepted term for a syndrome, I think. Cretinism can be the result of thyroid deficiency, I believe, and it includes retarded mental and physical development.