by Gary Gagne

Created on: August 18, 2008

First of all, to apply the term "crazy" to a human being is demeaning, it demonstrates a distinct lack of understanding and does not help anyone to treat a particular affliction. In fact, if a person uses the word "crazy" against another, very often, they are insinuating that that person needs be "locked up". It's a lot like being called a witch in the 1600s. On the other hand, I would not mind if someone used the word "crazy" to describe the mental health care system itself nor do I think it inaccurate to say that if you're not crazy before you enter the system you will soon be crazy.

I would also like to point out that many of the workers and practitioners within the mental health care system have many of the same afflictions as the patients themselves. The difference between patients and those who service them is that the latter are, to some degree, more functional than the patients. On the one hand, while this reality guarantees that some of the people who are taking care of the mentally ill have better insight into their condition, sometimes the workers and practitioners actually enable or even reinforce the mental illness. The majority of people who I speak to while working in the mental health care system are absolutely miserable, the ones who can maintain a pleasant demeanor standout, in my mind, as exceptional practitioners. If one worker addresses another in an angry or disrespectful way I can only imagine how they speak to the patients themselves. This is evidence to me that the burnout rate among mental health workers is very high. The reasons for this are obvious, to begin with, when a new patient approaches a mental health worker their name and face is different than the last person the worker spoke to but, very often, the patient's behavior is not.

A borderline personality, for instance, is difficult to deal with no matter who has it, it just depends on how extreme the personality is. Someone who is borderline is very often uncooperative, argumentative, attention seeking, dramatic, angry, and manipulative. They will work to place their caregivers into a corner in order to get whatever it is they want. It is then up to that worker to be assertive and say "no" or to comply with their outlandish requests. The more successful the borderline personality is at this technique, the more extreme their behavior becomes. Borderline personalities use manipulative behavior again and again to get what they want and if what they want is denied them they could

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