You want to hear something really whacked? Take a look at what the AP Stylebook has now ruled unacceptable for use by journalists and writers who use language correctly:
“Do not use derogatory terms, such as insane, crazy/crazed, nuts or deranged, unless they are part of a quotation that is essential to the story. Avoid using mental health terms to describe unrelated issues. Don’t say that an awards show, for example, was schizophrenic.”
I have covered the overreaches of the AP style people before, such as when they dictated against calling the illicit regular female sex partner of a married man his “mistress.” It’s not just that they keep overstepping their mandate, which is to rule on copy, in order to rule on morality that bugs me. It’s that they seem to be repeatedly ignorant about what they are exercising their authority over. And they do have quite a lot of authority. Familiarity with preferred AP style is a basic job requirement for journalists. Grammarly.com’s blog calls it simply “the style guide that newspaper reporters adhere to.”
This made it bad enough when they were using their outsize influence to rule against the Oxford comma. But now to be telling journalists they cannot say things are deranged, bonkers, crazy, nuts, cuckoo, insane, or mad? These people must be out of their minds.
What’s so frustrating is that they surely think they are being deferential to the needs of the experts on and sufferers of psychiatric illnesses. But they have that all wrong. Just look at their given example of a now-verboten usage, the metaphorical use of ”schizophrenic.” Eugen Beuler, the Swiss psychologist and contemporary of Freud, coined the term. Why did he choose those letters? For “schiz,” think schism. For “phrenia,” think of the pseudoscience of “phrenology,” for having to do with the brain or mind. It means, from the Latin, split mind.
Today, people who admirably work to “destigmatize mental health” have forgotten their own history. Schizophrenic Disorder has changed in its clinical psychiatric diagnostic criteria a great deal since it was first named. It is not Multiple Personality Disorder and instead refers primarily to delusions, disorganized speech, and a cluster of other distinct symptoms. And so the word police, thinking they are being precise, are being imprecise when they assert the primacy of the clinical psychiatric meaning over the more correct colloquial one.
When a critic refers to an awards show that takes multiple tones or has uneven writing as “schizophrenic,” it is not undermining the words, nor is it harming sufferers from a disorder. Neither does saying “that was crazy” or “he is nuts” or “what a wild ride that was” harm public understanding of mental health issues. This taboo serves no function other than to exist and see who observes it, which tells us something about what is going on over at the AP.
I am sure it can be frustrating for psychiatric professionals that people use OCD and ADD and such specific words for disorders based on colloquial usage. This is still no reason to erect bans on using perfectly innocuous metaphors in writing. And, it’s worth noting, “mental health” itself is a misuse of language here by the AP Stylebook. To quote the official journal of the World Psychiatric Association, “more than a scientific discipline, mental health is a political and ideological movement.” What the word police over at the AP were trying to say was mental illness. If only they thought about words and concepts before they tried to limit mine.
