"Do you think that you might be crazy?"  It is one of those impolite questions that I get to ask that makes being a therapist fun and rewarding.  When people come in to see me they are sometimes half-convinced that they are crazy.  Sometimes people confuse the intervention with the malady.  Smart people can have the unexamined belief that "If I take the pill, if I see the therapist that means that I am crazy."  Recently, I've started asking more.  A lot of people who come to see me are.  Worried, that is.  I guess whether they are crazy or not depends on what you mean. 

People who have a personal or family history of mental illness are often very worried about being crazy, sometimes terrified.  They may have a very particular idea of what mental illness looks like and be terrified that that's what's in store for them.  Other people come in with a fear that is augmented -- with lots of good intentions and some greed -- by attempts to broaden people's picture of who can experience mental illness.  On the one hand, attempts to destigmatize people with mental illness are laudable.  On the other hand, hyper-sensitizing people to mental illness, encouraging them to view themselves and everyone around them as psychological orchids who need specialized interventions simply to survive in the world, is IMHO, plainly nonsensical, inimical to good mental health and partly motivated by the desire to sell us stuff (medicines or other therapies) that we don't really need. 

I recently saw a woman who is a new immigrant to Canada.  She is having difficulty learning French and is a new mother.  She felt stressed, scared, overwhelmed, sad and very lonely.  She had been prescribed anti-depressants and an anti-psychotic for sleep (the practice of GPs prescribing anti-psychotics off label without the simplest discussion of sleep hygiene is troubling to me).  On top of everything that was going on in her life she was terrified that she was crazy.  The persistency and intensity of the feelings, a family history of mental illness, her sense that she should be able to get over them and probably the fact that she had been prescribed medication all fed into her sense that she was going crazy.  This is not to say that the anti-depressant was not appropriate.  But it had a powerful meaning for her.  When I asked if she was worried she was going crazy, she began to sob.  She is scared to pick up her French classes again or try to find a job because she views herself as too anxious to take on anything new.  She is becoming more isolated.  I asked her if seeing me was going to make her think she was crazy because I did not think she was and I did not want to do anything that would give her that idea.  If coming to see me would make her think she was crazy I would refuse to see her.  Why?  Because viewing herself as crazy was making her crazy(-er). 

People have all sorts of ideas about what being crazy might look like and what it would mean.  I saw a young woman the other day who wanted to know if she had Borderline Personality Disorder.  First, I told her that I am not a doctor and I can't make a diagnosis.  Then I asked her what it would mean if she did have it.  She felt like then doctors would have some direction about how to treat her so that all the stuff that wasn't working in her life would get better.  "And what if you are sad and lonely because important people in your life have been hurtful towards you for a long time?  What would that mean?"  "Then I'm just a screw up."  Crazy might be better than the alternative; the frightening responsibilities of sanity. 

It probably isn't very wise of me to admit this but I use the term crazy in my own head sometimes when I think about clients.  Usually what I think is, "What a crazy thing to do."  It means something like 'inexplicable and self-defeating'.  In other words "Human."  One thing I don't mean is "mentally ill."  Mental illness to me means something is going on in the person's mind that is far beyond the usual degree of human irrational, self-destructive behaviour.  I think what my clients worry about -- or sometimes even long for -- is being far beyond the human pale, unable to return, irreparably psychologically destroyed. 

Resilient is the opposite of crazy in that sense.  Child birth is messy, it is occasionally very dangerous.  But our survival as a species up until the 20th century is incontrovertible proof that it can usually be done outside of a hospital.  Similarly, the fact that humans are around at all is proof that we are well-equipped psychologically to deal with hard stuff, to suffer, to hurt,  and be hurt even to go crazy and to recover. 

I am glad to live in an age of medicine.  I believe in therapy.  Part of resiliency is having people around who can help you.  But therapists also need to remember to 'first, do no harm'.  And if the cure is worse than the malady then it's no cure.