I coined a word today—crazophobia. Crazophobia is the fear of contracting a mental illness by being in close proximity to or touching a mentally ill person or by hearing scary stories about the mentally ill. The common cure is to ridicule, ostracize, or otherwise demean the mentally ill person to make the crazophobic person feel superior and, therefore, immune.
Before I say I’m mentally ill, it’s important to note that I’m privileged and grateful. I’m deeply loved and supported. I’ve never wanted for anything, but I still struggle. My doctor treats my symptoms with medication, but I can’t exercise, pray, or wish away my disease, and keeping quiet only makes it worse. Anyone can be mentally ill. You can’t be too pretty or too rich to catch it. Mental illness is indiscriminate.
Yet I caught myself making fun of a neighbor with dementia. He got angry every time someone parked on the street in front of his house. I made fun of him. Me. People have been making fun of me for years—calling me psycho and crazy bitch. When I was in college, my dormmates created a special sorority for me called Phi Beta Bitch, due to my wildly different personality when imbibing in liquid refreshment.
I should know better than to make fun of a fellow sufferer. I do know better. But it is funny—not that he has to go through that, but that he thinks a public street belongs to him, that he thinks he can bully a large Tongan firefighter into moving his car, and when he can’t—this 5-foot-2-inch-tall, 135-pound, 80-year-old man gets his rifle. It’s ludicrous. The police don’t lock him up. They take away his rifle, and his stories become neighborhood lore, laughed about until we all move away or forget or die.
Crazy people are funny until we’re not. I know I’m off the beam when people step back when I’m talking. I’m intense and angry, and everything is urgent—must be heard, must be done—now, now, now. On the other hand, people think I’m hysterical. I say what I think: no filter.
When it all goes to Hell, I hear voices. I hear a 1950s radio newscaster announcing the news on the other side of the room. I can’t understand what he says, but I hear him. I hear a Cinderella ball next to me—music, tinkling glasses, laughter. I can’t hear the words to the music or what the people are laughing about. It’s like I’m in the next room or downstairs. I hear heavy machinery driving through the bedroom at 4 a.m. Yeah, it’s like that. I’m that kinda crazy, but I go to work, get married, make friends, have children, and soldier on. You don’t know unless I tell you. You call me eccentric.
Crazophobia is not a word. It should be. People belittle and vilify us because they don’t understand. We’re defective and troublesome, but most of all, scary. The only difference between me and the homeless man screaming obscenities on the street is money—money for health care, a Stanford-educated psychiatrist, and medicine. That’s it. I stop taking my medicine and seeing the doctor. Bam! I’m sitting next to the homeless man in a jail cell or the local mental hospital’s day room. That’s why you’re scared. That’s why I’m scared. We’re crazophobic.
To learn more about psychiatric conditions, see the Mayo Clinic’s articles on Mental illness and Mental health: What’s normal, what’s not.