Off the Godless Deep End

Posted on December 7, 2005 in Crosstalk Flames Stigma

Lindsey Beyerstein went off the Godless deep end in her criticism of California author Anne Lamott, characterizing the Marin County Episcopalian as “crazy”. She especially didn’t like it when Lamott found herself thinking about how she’d treated a carpet salesman who’d screwed her. Lamott wrote:

I was trembling, and you could have opened walnuts with my self-righteousness. But Jesus doesn’t hold this against a person. His message is that we’re all sort of nuts and suspicious and petty and full of crazy hungers, and it all feels awful a lot of the time, but even so — one’s behavior needs to be decent. So I would try.

Lindsey calls Lamott “smug” for being “passive”. But worse, she calls her “crazy”. Never mind that Lindsay is not a diagnostician. She who would never use the N-word happily brands someone she does not like with the C-word. She has no clue. No fucking clue at all about the damage and the hatred she is spreading.

Early in 1993, I was in Buffalo, New York, lecturing about the war in former Yugoslavia. A woman in one of my audiences asked me “but why do you think the people are doing this?”

“Well,” I said, “I think that some key people over there are just crazy.”

A schizophrenic woman identified herself and challenged my use of the C-word. She spoke about how hurtful it was, how it served as a setback in her struggle to master her disease. That was a walnut-splitting moment for me.

I didn’t argue because the blunt end of a Good Point had been thrust in my face. I apologized on the spot and talked with her afterwards. I took the time to learn.

Ironically, a year later, I was diagnosed with Major Depression. For the next few years, I found myself having to explain to people that clinical depression wasn’t usually something that up and left after a few months, that most of us (70%) never stopped having episodes. Through my own life experiences, I began to understand why the young woman had been so upset. Life with mental illness was hard. What’s more, you were surrounded with people who used your sickness as a cricket bat being used to swat ants.

In January of this year, my diagnosis was changed to Bipolar I. I am also classed as a sufferer of OCD. I do not see myself as a victim of either of these diseases. I suffer from others, too: diabetes, a heart condition, and asthma. No one has ever called me sugar-eater or ticky heart or wheezy. Despite the fact that I suffer from a brain disorder — one that can be picked up on an MRI scan — people think it is fair to run around and use “crazy” in a way that suggests that a person is cognitively impaired, that they cannot think rationally.

This is the kind of shit we take every day from the insecure and the joyless.

I don’t know if Anne Lamott suffers from any kind of brain disorder. I am not a diagnostician. Likewise, I will not attach a label to Lindsey Beyerstein which exceeds my professional competence to do so. I will point to her use of the term “crazy” as coming off as smug, thoughtless and arrogant. She has a lot to learn. One could hope that maybe the heavy mallet that crushed me and so many others would descend to teach her lesson, but then — I don’t want this disease afflicting anyone at all. It sucks.

Final note: it is never rational to make a psychological diagnosis — no matter how refined or how crude — when you don’t know the first facts and don’t care about the possible patient. Doing so is an ego trip and nothing more.