Bipolar Today

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Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi found himself in some hot water this weekend when he tweeted “I know I should not bother when you’re off your meds, but I love how freedom of speech is now an extreme lefty issue.” in retort to blogger Werner Patel on the website Twitter. This raised some eyebrows among mental health workers, who thought that the comment was inappropriate and offensive to those with mental illnesses. Nenshi apologized for his wording, but did not apologize to Patel, saying that “there’s certain authenticity and when people engage with me on Twitter, that’s what they get.” The Globe and Mail has full coverage of the story here.

Commentary

I don’t normally cover “politically incorrect” language stories, but Naheed Nenshi is a high-profile political figure in Canada, and this is more than a misuse of language.

The problem isn’t that his comment just uses some inappropriate word that, over time, we have decided is inappropriate, like “crazy” or “lunatic” (words that I don’t much like either, but wouldn’t write a post about). Accusing people of “being off their meds” does a number of things:

• It dismisses people simply on the grounds that they might be mentally ill.
• It assumes that, if mentally ill people are symptomatic, they are not medicated. This is simply not true.
• As a result, it assumes that, if mentally ill people are symptomatic, it is their own fault, because there must be some “miracle drug” out there that could prevent the symptoms.

This belief that there is a “miracle drug” out there, and that any mentally ill person must be somehow “off his or her meds”, makes people feel justified in discriminating against people who are mentally ill who are symptomatic. It also makes symptomatic mentally ill people ashamed of their symptoms because they are now a sign of supposedly not seeking proper treatment.

Maybe Nenshi didn’t mean all of this, and he did apologize, sort of, but he made a mistake not just in words, but in meaning. If he’d called someone “crazy” rather than “mentally ill”, okay, that’s just poor word choice. But when he accuses someone of being “off his meds”, he’s now saying something that, no matter what synonyms he used, would be offensive and entrench stigma around mental illness.

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