[Don't] Call Me Crazy: 33 Voices Start the Conversation about Mental Health

by Kelly Jensen

with the ever-present impostor syndrome, fed into what I’ve been good at doing for so long: treating myself like shit. My BPD diagnosis verified all my suspicions that I was a selfish, vile person. I began overanalyzing every single action I took and every single thought I had. This was my way of making sense of what I could. What hurt so much about BPD is that the diagnosis referred to my entire personality. I felt like it encompassed everything about me and should have been something I could control.

So I opted to do what anyone would do when they have a weird off-putting personal thing going on: I kept the whole thing inside me and wrote myself off as a controlling, bitchy kind of person.

A couple of years ago, I told a therapist (a pretty good one) about how chaotic and limitless the thoughts in my head have always felt. He tried to frame my perspective with a metaphor: Imagine our thoughts are individually contained in boxes with lids on them, and that most people can pick which box they want to open, thereby releasing that thought. Is it like all the boxes in your mind are always open? I said not really—it’s more like all the boxes are open, launching themselves into the air, and aggressively hurling their contents into my face over and over.

Do I wear a sign about my neck that reads: Here Be a Real-Life Crazy Person—Tread Carefully? What do people expect of me, once they know?

My suffering was not art. It was just suffering. It was untreated mental illness and drug addiction and PTSD and a little girl trapped in the body of a young woman who was screaming for strangers to see her because the people who mattered to her never could.

sometimes that communication comes out as a confession. And maybe that’s okay. Because maybe confessing is better than keeping it all in. Maybe telling secrets is better than letting those secrets fester and poison us and make us sick. Even when they’re cries for help. Maybe especially when they’re cries for help.

I absorbed the pain until it became shame.

I move toward a timeline of Van Gogh’s life, large on a prominent stretch of wall. His birth, his major career moments, and his breakdowns. This is familiar to me. Not his personal details, per se, but the inclusion of “episodes” in the timeline of someone’s life. It’s like any other milestone—a birthday or graduation or promotion. The calendar in my memory lists all the times the pain scale went past 9.

One thing I have learned from years of migraines is that I can try medicine and sometimes find comfort in distraction—a podcast at a low volume, a bath. But, usually, I just have to outlast them. It’s been a useful lesson for depression. Outlasting doesn’t feel very noble, though. It mostly feels like being in bed.

It is a choice between distraction and despair.

“Idle hands are the devil’s playthings,” so the saying goes. But it’s an idle mind I fear. There is a franticness to my pace. A desperation to my process. I am always working.

Prolonged eye contact was among the things I have never recovered. Not yet anyway. I work on it every so often, with my counselor, and with an app on my phone. But I’m not worried about it. Eye contact is not a harbinger of decency. It’s just a skill. It would be overstating the case to say that I ever “missed” it. Growing up unafraid to say the wrong thing? I missed that. Allegedly, there were people who didn’t practice words in their heads before they said them. They just opened up and were out with it. It sounded made up, but that’s what I was told. Whatever that was called, that talking without practicing the sounds—without wringing out the words first, to make sure they wouldn’t stain any moment—that would have been nice to try on as a kid, to feel it.

I can work on relearning any behavior that was taken from me if I choose to.

I remain convinced that eye contact is totally overrated. You know who can maintain excellent eye contact? Serial killers. If I never effortlessly go eyes-to-eyes with others? I can live with that.

Call me crazy. Go ahead, you wouldn’t be the first to do it, and you probably won’t be the last. That’s because I am crazy. Loony tunes. Bananas. Bonkers. Stark raving mad. Certifiable. Insane. Loco. Nuts. Psycho. You’re not going to hurt my feelings if you tell it like it is, although my psychiatrist always looks faintly dismayed when I call myself crazy, saying, with a slightly pained expression: “Well, I mean, I wouldn’t . . .” and then sort of trailing off before handing me one of my insurer’s brightly colored pamphlets for crazy group. (Spoiler: They don’t actually call it that. I’d probably consider going if they did.)

Historically and today, “troublesome women” are often psychiatrized in ways that silence them or minimize their experiences, using the stigma surrounding mental health conditions to marginalize patients. In the pre-DSM era, a dude named Samuel A. Cartwright came up with “drapetomania” to describe a curious cluster of symptoms seen in enslaved people, who for some reason kept running away from their masters. Clearly, he concluded, they did so because they were crazy. No, seriously, go look it up, but prepare to fall into the rabbit hole of scientific racism, because this wasn’t the first or the last time that perfectly rational responses to oppression were labeled as illnesses.

The social model posits that individuals may have impairments that affect how they interact with society, but society chooses whether to disable them or not.

And more importantly, decide for yourself if you want to call yourself crazy. If you want to allow others to do so, and if so, under which circumstances. Because one way to fight stigma is to look it in the eye and control it. You take the sting out of crazy when it’s how you talk about yourself, so go nuts, if you know what I mean.