I was driving to a town in Colorado a couple of weeks ago and heard a teenage girl in the backseat of the car casually, laughingly accuse her friend of being “bipolar.” Aha, I thought, another case of kids appropriating in-the-news health language for insult purposes. A relatively obscure (though horrible) mental illness had entered the hot soup of teen slang, probably via the whole Britney meltdown.
It’s a tried-and-true taunt technique: You have the thing my parents are whispering about (and, today, the Internet is screaming about). Twenty years ago, I heard young kids tossing around AIDS insults the way I used to deploy the term “cooties” when I was doing schoolyard battle. After AIDS, bulimia.
Now, we could all sing the old loss-of-innocence lament, because it’s a long way from cooties to HIV, and even a long way from calling someone “mental” to calling them “bipolar.” But we live in medicalized times, and kids know the times they live in. Imagine the barbs they may sharpen out of the advertisers’ alphabet of modern ills: ED, HPV, RLS, and on and on.
Comments (3)
You have never been Bipolar then. You are not the school bully because your thoughts are moving around in your head and you are unable to concentrate on one thing because of the motion.
Try being bipolar – you will change your opinion.
Oh yes I would like to
“try being bipolar.” Where can I get one?
People, do things and then later regret them and the best they can say is to blame it on some mental disorder. It is weird that people used to mature and now they just become diseased.
To susu: I agree that being bipolar is horrid; I’ve been treated for it since I was a teenager. Having said that, I do not think that was the point of this post. Schoolyard bullies have called other children names for time out of mind… and most often these names are terms they heard adults around them use.
I do not think that Scott was in any way maligning suffers of bipolar disorder, rather he was highlighting the way children taunt each other with terms they probably do not grasp the meaning of.