In reply to redsonja:
> I think they're lunatics and idiots and maniacs and you can derive from that what you want. anyone who cuts someones head off and scribbles all over it or puts someone in a cage and burns them alive is evil beyond description and in my opinion makes them maniacs
Well, the thread derail appears well and truly to have developed a life of its own, so I might as well come back in
A declaration of interest: my work is in the field of mental health. So my issue in this is not one of political correctness. It is seeing the very real discrimination, stigma, and prejudice that people I work with experience on a day to day basis.
There is a widely held view, evident from some posters on this thread, that doing bad things, expecially violent things, is a sign of mental health problems. Around that, there is the use of pejorative terms for people with mental illness as terms of abuse towards people who have done things we find hard to understand, and that make us angry. The wider impact of this is that large numbers of people believe that people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (=manic depression- which mania is a symptom of- and so 'maniac') are inherently dangerous and not able to be part of society.
I'm pretty certain that the people that carried out the atrocities in Tunisia and Kuwait were not mentally ill. They were, in all likelihood, as sane as the people reading this thread. As were the 9/11 hijackers, and the 7/7 bombers. They were evil, but that is not the same as being ill, except in the minds of the bigoted. Using terms of abuse to describe terrorists that imply mental illness caused their actions both downplays the culpability and evilness of the terrorists, and smears people who genuinely have severe mental disorders, adding to the stigma they already experience.
The terrorists are bad people, who do bad things. Call them names if you want, if it makes you feel better. That's entirely fair enough, they are scum, who should rot in hell for eternity, if such a place existed. But please stop using abusive terms that equate being ill with being a terrorist. There are plenty of terms of abuse left you can still use.
It is really rather disappointing that, having explained all this already, posters are still freely using the terms nutter, lunatic, maniac. It's as if it was explained why the terms paki and nigger were not really acceptable, and people just went on doing it. You wouldn't, would you? Well why is it ok because maniac, nutter, and lunatic mean mentally ill?
The capacity of human beings to behave in ways that are revolting, appalling, and evil, never ceases to surprise me. From concentration camp guards (Godwin's, I know), to stalin's and pol pots thugs murdering millions, to American administrations sponsoring state terrorism in Central America, to the hell on earth of Somalia, south Sudan, Syria, to the everyday mundane evil of child abuse happening on an industrial scale across the towns and cities of Britain, we are capable of boundless depravity. But there is one common theme there- none of these atrocities were carried out by people with severe mental illnesses. So why on earth, when it comes to expressing how disgusted we are at their behaviour, do were turn to the language of mental disorder?
Why? Because it makes us feel better. It's mad people that do bad things. They're different from us, and I'm not mad, so I couldn't do something like that. We can tell who they are, by their madness, and we can do something about them, stop them walking the streets.
Except that it isn't like that. The soldiers that massacred Muslim kids at srebrenica, , or Vietnamese kids at Mei lai, weren't mad. They were normal young men, who did unspeakable things because of the situation they were in. And the young men carrying out whatever the medieval atrocity of the month is in the Islamic state aren't mad. They know exactly what they are doing. And they are fully responsible for it. I hope they see the inside of a court, where it is shown to them that the law of man does indeed carry more authority than the law of god,
Best wishes
Gregor