This is a really common worry. I know that because I’m a psychiatrist. And when this world gets bad enough, it’s often the case that you end up in the office of somebody like me. And then, maybe for the first time, maybe not for the first time, you ask me, “what if I’m going crazy?”
To both provide reassurance to people who are suffering, and both eliminate and possibly generate business for myself in a way, I will explain shortly, I provide the following service.
The following is not medical advice, but it’s what I would answer most of the time:
“That’s not a big deal around here.”
Do you see what I did there? I didn’t say you were or were not going crazy.
Now, given you’re just reading this column, and I may or may not have ever met you—This is a pretty safe thing to say…because I do not know.
I am a dual board-certified child and adult psychiatrist. I have over 75,000 hours of clinical experience. I’ve seen what ever going crazy might look like, and it is my literal medical specialty to both make that call and to solve that problem with people. We do it collaboratively.
So I’m not worried about it. I think I can handle it. I think we can handle it.
But I didn’t provide a very reassuring answer around the actual question of whether or not any individual person was going crazy, much less a specific reader.
People have their own definitions of crazy, and it’s a colloquial term, not a medical one. But I’m will defined it, practically:
The kind of crazy people worry about? That is kind of losing their mind that is regularly the subject of fear and dread? It it not something that’s an actual problem. Not for the people worrying about it.
If you are worried, you do not have that kind of problem.
People who have the kind of unwellness of the mind, in which they are losing touch with objective reality? That is something that they—almost by definition—that is not the thing they are worried about.
If you're worried about it, that's a problem, but it's a different problem.
That is…anxiety!*