A Rose By Any Other Name

"You really must be psycho then!" said a boy to my daughter at school.

"I'd rather you didn't use words like 'psycho', they offend me." replied Julie with dignity.

She picked a good target because luckily for her he apologised at once. "I feel quite confident about speaking out about it." she told me later.

I was proud of her, but I felt bound to warn her that not everyone is that amenable. Here is Purplepersuasion trying to persuade the Times not to bandy about words like "certifiable" or "bonkers" in an article about the singer Robbie Williams. Unlike the teenager who was careless talking to my daughter, the Times did not see fit to apologise. Admittedly, even the Times might blanch at throwing the word "psycho" casually into an article, but the word is cheerfully flourishing elsewhere. I hesitate now to bring out my old DVD of Talking Heads with its thumping rendition of "Psycho Killer".

Coincidentally I had another conversation with my son Duncan the other day about what he described as "psychotic killers". (I know this does sound like a bizarre conversation, but you have to keep a very open mind when you're talking to a teenage boy). His English teacher had been encouraging a classroom debate about something or other and he repeated the phrase he thought she had used: "psychotic killer". I thought it a bit unlikely that an English teacher would make this sort of elementary mistake, but to be on the safe side I explained to him carefully that she had either said, or meant to say, "psychopathic killer". The problem with "psycho killer", or actually "psycho" is that it can be the short form of either "psychotic" (meaning that you are experiencing things that other people do not experience) or "psychopathic" (which means the kind of personality found in some killers, typically very short on empathy and long on deception). But it was his response that really made me think, because he said:

"Well, why does it matter?"

It was interesting to find evidence that our policy of keeping him a bit separate from his sister's illness was working so well! But it struck me that the reason this sort of error persists is that people think that it doesn't matter. Not many people realise how widespread psychotic experiences are (some surveys suggest that 10% of us hear voices regularly), so they don't think it matters very much if people who have psychotic experiences are accidentally lumped in with that tiny group of highly abnormal people who are psychopathic. The thinking is probably something like: it is all a bit unpleasant anyway, and you wouldn't want to meet any of them.

I made sure Duncan had a bit more information, just so it was clear that it mattered because it mattered to his mum. And also, just in case his teacher really had accidentally said "psychotic killer", he would have had enough ammunition to speak out like his sister had done.