A Phrase To Renounce For 2014: ‘The Mentally Ill’ | CommonHealth

I wince every time I read it. So does the president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Paul Summergrad, he says.

I saw it most recently in The New York Times, in the headline pictured above and a recent masthead editorial: “Equal Coverage For The Mentally Ill.” It’s all over, from The Boston Globe — “New Era for the Mentally Ill“ – to The Wall Street Journal — “Crime and The Mentally Ill.” Just about any media outlet you care to name.

What’s so bad about “the mentally ill”? Isn’t it reasonable shorthand in the usual headline space crunch?

In a word, no, says Dr. Summergrad, psychiatrist-in-chief at Tufts Medical Center and chair of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine. He sees two main problems with it. First, the definite article, “the.”

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Second, Dr. Summergrad said, “there’s the denotation of what mental illness means, but there’s also the connotation. When people ask me, is it really possible that 25 percent of the population is mentally ill, what do they mean by that question?”

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I’d add a third argument against “the mentally ill”,,,Some newly minted peer specialists sat me down and re-educated me about the wrongness of using “the mentally ill” and the rightness of using “people first” language. A person is not defined by a diagnosis, they said. If you have a mental illness it doesn’t define you any more than your heart disease defines you if you’re a cardiac patient. A person is a person who happens to have depression or schizophrenia; the correct term is “people with mental illness.”

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Virtually all illnesses have biological, environmental and psychological components. We could say the same for migraines, ulcers, asthma or diabetes. But it does not make one feel uneasy if we say, “He has asthma.’ On the other hand, ‘He has depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder feels so very different. Is that because it is labeled ‘mental?’ Certainly. ‘Mental’ is an arbitrary negative label that segregates something psychic, personal or ‘in the head’ from the body and the environment. It also is very scary.”

A Phrase To Renounce For 2014: ‘The Mentally Ill’ | CommonHealth