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11:22pm November 24, 2013

madeofpatterns:

rutdeleu said: Personally “oh, that’s because they’re mentally ill” rubs me the wrong way, and “what are you, crazy?!” doesn’t.

And the worst thing is when people conflate crazy with evil or treat evil as a medical condition. Because evil is a thing.

Yep.

One time I described getting in-person death threats, and someone immediately said “There’s a lot of people with mental illness living where you live.”

How on earth they leapt from “death threats” to “mental illness” is beyond me.

One thing that really bothers me about that – no matter who is doing it – is that there’s this… thing.  Where people assume that “people who do things wrong” are somehow set apart from whatever they see as ordinary people.  And from there, they leap to “crazy” (or some euphemism), or some other kind of disabled person, or PoC, or poor people, or some other scapegoat, or many types of scapegoats combined.

They never want to look and see that bad things are a part of themselves, a part of all of us.  Or that instead of finding the most oppressed person and assuming they’re the most likely to do bad things, maybe they need to be looking at privilege as a source of bad things people do.  I mean there are people more likely to do bad things than others, but you can’t automatically assume someone who’s done something bad is such a person.  And you can’t automatically assume that you know what sorts of people are more likely to do bad things than others.  And you can’t automatically jump from bad things to evil.  And you can’t jump from evil to crazy (or any of the other things I’ve described).

(Although some variations on crazy can mean being scared of unusual or nonexistent things and doing bad things because you’re terrified, in the same way that all people do when they’re terrified for more ordinary reasons.  But that things like that have to be dealt with the same way other people deal with how they behave when terrified.)

Argh this is brain stuff and I’m not good at doing brain stuff right now.  Brain stuff being like thought-chunk-connects-to-thought-chunk stuff.

But yeah.  I’ve also encountered the thing where evil is seen as medical.  And that really disturbs me.  I’ve seen it both among people who consider themselves mental illness advocates because they themselves are mentally ill (and that’s how they view it, definitely not ‘crazy’, never 'crazy’), and among people who are just plain prejudiced, and they come at it from completely different angles, but the similarities in the conclusions they come to are stunning.

Except that then they diverge.  The just plain ordinary prejudiced people will say those mentally ill people, you can’t trust them, they’re dangerous.  The mental illness advocates will say those people, they’re not evil, they’re mentally ill, you should treat them with understanding.

And there’s no room there for understanding that evil is not the same thing as mentally ill, that doing evil is not the same thing as being evil, but that there are also people who are almost dedicated to doing evil in some ways, and that you really have to watch out there and can’t just explain it away as an illness. And also that people are predisposed to doing evil inadvertently, and that’s different, and needs to be dealt with differently, but the first thing you’ve got to do is admit it and understand that it’s real (and is different than being dedicated to doing evil).  Again, there’s a lot of layers there and most people aren’t looking at them.  And none of that at all is about being crazy.  

Also that automatically deciding that a person who does bad things must be crazy (and therefore not quite responsible for doing bad things), actually makes it harder for some crazy people to stop doing bad things, or easier to start doing bad things.

Argh too many tangents brain not doing this.