Consider “insanity”: bananas, batty, berserk, bonkers, cockamamie, crackpot, cracked, crazy, cuckoo, daffy, daft, delirious, demented, deranged, dotty, erratic, fanatical, flipped out, freaky, freelance, gaga, haywire, hyphy, insane, loco, loony, lost-the-plot, lunatic, mad, maniac, mental, moody, not-all-there, nutcase, nutjob, nuts, nutter, postal, psycho, senseless, scary, sick-in-the-head, spaz, trippin’, unbalanced, unhinged, unstable, weird, whacked, whacko, zany, etc…

Clearly we have made it easy to label insanity. Why should this be so? The facile answer would be, there are a lot of crazy people out there. But plenty of things occur as often as insanity without much linguistic flair. This arsenal of put-downs offers us a quick draw, an ever-loaded gun. Having so many words for insanity, we needn’t consider it very long. Our cruelty is our escape.

When we call someone crazy, by definition we are calling ourselves sane – as only a sane person could make such a distinction. It’s a way of separating and consoling ourselves (cruelty always is). Thank God we’re not like that. It stands to reason, then, that what we fear about crazy people is not entirely external. Or as Goethe put it, “We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds.” We are too intent on putting ourselves in the company of the sane.

Most of us are happy to leave it at that. We don’t think terribly hard about sanity, and what that means to us. What are the details of a sane life? (One can assume there are a vast number.) Is sanity something to achieve, or must it come naturally? Can we teach someone to be sane? Can we inspire that? In Going Sane: Maps of Happiness (a fantastic book), Adam Phillips writes about this very subject, our reluctance to define sanity on its own terms. He closes the book with this amazing passage:

It would be sane now… to take it for granted that everyone is even more confused than they seem. Havoc is always wreaked in fast cures for confusion. The sane believe that confusion, acknowledged, is a virtue; and that humiliating another person is the worst thing we ever do. Sanity should not be our word for the alternatives to madness; it should refer to whatever resources we have to prevent humiliation.

How true. Phillips is suggesting, in his startlingly compassionate way, that we really can drive people mad, including ourselves – that our terrors of madness can actually beget madness when they lead us to bigotry.

We are too worried about being sane. In other words, we are too worried about being insane. We throw epithets like “crazy” around to distinguish ourselves from others. It may be a quick comfort, but those others pay the price for our peace of mind. As Adam Phillips points out, we need to work harder to acknowledge our own humiliations, and the way we humiliate others. And he suggests, rightly so, that we will all be more sane for doing so.

It’s as if, in order to achieve a collective sanity, we all have to admit we’re a little crazy. Not just admit it, really; not just say it out loud. We have to find comfort in our craziness, in the way it connects us. We have to share our bananas with the world.

We’re not inclined to do this. Sanity is about being calm, stable and comprehensible, we tell ourselves. Yet the fundamental insight of psychotherapy proves otherwise. The genius of Freudian free-association shows us that we can reveal ourselves – and attempt to make peace with ourselves – by making less sense, not more. We can become intelligible to ourselves (and one another) if we worry less about being intelligible. And when we “discover” our follies this way, we take a step closer to understanding the psychological predicaments of all.

If we really care about suicide prevention and mental health, we have to be honest about our own confusions; we have to stop trying so hard to appear sane; we have to relate to each other. Our own passions and fears about this tumultuous world have been, and always will be, a key to understanding those who seem too passionate, too afraid, or too confused.

This may sound like a tall order, calling for more openness. But it beats trying to make people happier. The more we celebrate our inner turmoil (and why not celebrate it?), “mental illness” will become a less lonely, less terrifying diagnosis. We will lose fewer people to suicide.

We cannot deny this, however: it is easier to welcome the buried than it is to live with the insane. Suicide may be preventable more often, but not without some fundamental hard work. Yes, we have to be kinder to others and ourselves, less judgmental, more open minded. But we also have to accept what insanity has to offer: a certain lesson that life, and the life of the mind, can be more awful and erratic than we ever dared to imagine, and that our plans, no matter our dedication, may have to change.