Recently I was telling my hubby about a new friend who’d confided in me that her mother is bipolar. Well, I said it that way, “her mother is bipolar,” but then suddenly remembered that this is not at all what she said. She said: “My mom has bipolar disorder.” Now I’ve always been big on choosing words carefully, especially as it relates to the issue of mental illness, but it never occurred to me until that day that my grammar could be contributing to the stigma surrounding mental illness.
For example, I often catch myself saying “O, I’m so OCD.” I confess, “I used to be anorexic.” I’ve heard others say, “My son is ADD” or “My daughter is bipolar.”
Could you imagine if we talked about other illnesses in this way? Imagine saying, “He is hepatitis,” or “I have a friend who is epilepsy” or even “My daughter is a cough”! I’m sure most people would say I’ve descended to the level of the ridiculous here.
We do use descriptors like “diabetic” or “myopic” with this structure; i.e. “She is diabetic”. Even then however we wouldn’t dream of saying that someone is diabetes. There is no such constraint against using “OCD” as a noun in an equative sentence like “She is OCD.” “Bipolar” is a little bit ambiguous from a linguistic perspective (sorry for getting linguistic-y on you. Well, not too sorry): in a sentence like “She is bipolar,” the word “bipolar” could be either an adjective (descriptor) or a noun, but I’m guessing from the way I’ve heard other mental disorders named in equative sentences, that most people are using it as a noun, like “diabetes” or “influenza”.
Even as an adjective though, using disease words to describe people is only done in very specific circumstances, and very rarely. The idea of saying about a person that “she is cancerous” makes my stomach turn! How do we get away with it with mental illnesses that are just as horrific and terminal?
No matter how we may try to justify ourselves, the way we talk does influence the way we think. No, language does not control or define our worldview. But it has its effect. Let’s not equate persons with diseases.
I’m just sayin’. Watch your mouth. I’ll be watching mine.
(If you want to read more about identity and fighting the person and disease equation, read my first post, here.)
