Crazy Happens

Whatever Happened to ‘Crazy’?

Says Stacy McCain in response to the new Ft. Hood shooting:

. . .We have become so sensitive about mental illness that we are afraid to call crazy by its right name. Since no one else will do it, therefore, let me be the first to say that Ivan Lopez was crazy, bonkers, deranged, off his rocker and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Being the Internet’s Leading Amateur Expert in Crazy, I’ve sometimes been accused of insensitivity toward nutjobs and wackos.

Sympathy for the demented has become so widespread that people nowadays write books about how crazy they are, hoping to win some kind of Victimhood Derby Prize, like the lesbian professor who wrote a book about her borderline personality disorder. Being an affirmative action “twofer” — both female and homosexual — wasn’t enough for her, you see. Now she’s also disabled, so that if she goes off the deep end and starts having lesbian S & M orgies in the classroom as part of her Women’s Studies lectures, the university wouldn’t dare fire her, for fear of a civil-rights lawsuit.

Don’t laugh. Hugo Schwyzer nearly got away with that trick.

Using mental illness to play the Victimhood Card is becoming routine. Last year, when it was revealed that notorious Twitter troll Melissa Brewer (@catsrimportant) was a convicted prostitute, she immediately claimed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as an excuse. Because being a crazy whore is somehow better than being a sane whore.

So now we have the media telling us that Ivan Lopez was “undergoing treatment for depression and anxiety,” as if shooting 19 people before committing suicide wasn’t a big enough clue that his mental health was “unstable.” Gee, ya think so?

As I said four years ago, after Pentagon shooter Patrick Bedell was shot by police, “Whatever Happened to Crazy?”

Crazy got taken over by the excuse industry. The simple fact is that given a few hundred personality traits that might be conceived of in a single human, it's quite likely that a few are likely to lie at the extremes of the distribution, i.e. crazy.  We're probably all a little crazy in some way. Some more than others. And most crazy doesn't excuse criminal behavior, even as it helps to explain it.

The trick is to identify the ones that are going to become dangerously crazy as opposed to the ones which will stay just annoyingly crazy for a lifetime.  Depression and anxiety don't do it.  If depression and anxiety at some point were the definition of dangerously crazy, most of the population would spend time in the funny farm.

The trick is identifying the dangerously crazy needles in the annoyingly crazy haystack. It doesn't always get done in time. Alas.