Insanity. You walk the streets and you see a 40+ man, with a scruffy face and raggedy clothing, torn clothing. He looks as if he hasn’t had a shower in the past week and although he isn’t bothering anyone, he seems to be mumbling to himself. What do you think ?

Its pretty simple. Most of us slap on a label and call him ‘crazy’. You go home, tell all your friends about the crazy man you saw when walking home. They look excited and scared at the same time and then indulge in more stories about all the crazies they have seen on the streets.

In its entirety, insanity is a label we slap on individuals who deviate from the social norms we are so intertwined with. Insanity, is the individual who is your stereotypical image of a man with schizophrenia. Insanity brings with it, two other lovely labels – violent and dangerous. Those who are insanse must be violent and dangerous ? Thats what differs them from us, right ? Thats what creates the dichotomy that separates us from them.Those who are insane must be violent because they’re quite simply ‘fucked up’. They’re dangerous because they have no idea of who they are or where they’re going.

But what about an individual who is encompassed by his love for another. The constant thinking about her, her touch, her love, her voice, her face. The constant need to be with her and to see her. The fear of losing her to another, a fear that encompasses him that it enrages him when he thinks of another man being close to her. Fear that causes anger, hatred for her since she is the root of his fear. The need to keep her to himself, ’shield’ her from the world? Why do we label this as a man deeply in love, a man that is so blinded by love. His overcompensating feelings of her, that overtake his world, becomes his obsession, is this not similar to the man who washes his hands 30 times a day thinking that he’ll die with the germs on them or the man who is scared that someone is following him, that he is paranoid in all of his actions? Both take over the individual’s everday actions.

We often become so caught up in making sure we don’t act ‘crazy’ or ‘insane’ as its such a negative thing. We don’t disclose if we have depression, or a substance abuse disorder. We don’t disclose if we have schizophrenia or anorexia. Yet we disclose that we have breast cancer, leukemia, lung disease, and maybe even alzheimers. Why do we make a distinction between the positive types of disease and the negatives ? In the end they all affect us internally and physically.

I find it sad that in this day and age we continue to view the mentally ill as dangerous people who need to be locked up and put away. They have a problem that is just as debilitating as perhaps cancer, but we choose to view one as a positive and the other as a negative.

Personally, as I have said to many of you, that the line between insanity and sanity is often so thin, that we pass in between at many points in our lives. Sometimes, we dismiss it because we attribute it to the current stressors in our lives, we have school, work or family..so its okay for us to act crazy. But those who are mentally ill, are just unstable, lazy and have no jobs. So we dismiss their causal factors and attribute their illness to their personal factors. To those who choose to use that route of labeling, I label them, as insecure and ignorant.

If you ever get to know anyone who has had a mental illness, you can see that most often than not, with a few exceptions, they are quite lovely and hilarious in their everyday exchanges. They often are simple people with a disease that is mentally debilitating. But most of all, they are people. So next time you see a person on the subway, before you slap a label on him and call him crazy…think of him as a person first. It might change your view of those afflicted with mental illness.