People with mental illnesses are a particularly interesting subculture because mental illness strikes all groups, regardless of race, ethnicity, or class. Often mental illness serves as a great equalizer, for once a person is “labelled” mentally ill, this tends to become his or her predominant status, unless he or she is “high functioning” enough to hide it and “pass for normal.” But most mentally ill people either can’t always hide it or don’t want to.
I am an active tradition bearer of the oral culture of us, “crazies” who don’t “pass for normal,” who have been hospitalized, whose subculture is held together not by having the same hobby or job but by stigma. Often we invert the stigma through a subversive sense of humor, by acting it out, by telling each other tragic-comic, over the top, surreal, absurdist, bizarre, dark, satirical stories and jokes that claim the stigma on our own terms as a way of dispelling and mocking it.
Other times we swap more tragic stories to help us deal with the chaos and uncertainty of our lives on the margins and our questionable legal status. Meeting each other, we tell stories to bond. We swap horror stories to brag about what we’ve survived. We tell stories to ensure that our stories are told, from our perspective, because our perspective is so often pathologized and discredited.
I found conditions in the hospital, where I lived when I was 12 and 13, to be so alien from the “real world” outside that my old vocabulary became inadequate to express the realities of my hospitalized life. Inside, I picked up new colloquialisms and clinical terms from my fellow patients and my doctors and absorbed them. My new lexicon was of part slang and part clinical speech which acted as an acid-laced commentary on the stigmatizing words and attitudes wielded against us as weapons. In response we picked up those words and used them with sarcastic emphasis to lunge back at the doctors, staff, the “theys”, who often embroiled us into conflict over what was real, and what was not. We regarded the hospital workers as “theys” in opposition to us. We felt we were treated like animated, walking, talking “pathologies,” not human beings. Sometimes we let our vocabulary degrade to “psychobabble” in order to spotlight words so ridiculous in their innocuous sounding inaccuracy, that whenever we heard them or used them we smirked.
What I’ve noticed about my storytelling style is that I load it with “yous” to make the crazy experience nice and intimate for the “norms.” I try to take it up close and personal into the heart of madness.
— an excerpt from “Mental Illness Folklore,”an essay by Viesia for a college course in folklore.
