This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Nottingham chapter.

Anyone catch ‘Love’ on Netflix? I seriously binged on it: nice guy Gus, cool girl Mickey, lots of awkward parties and hilarious screenplay. It was all fun and games up until the last episode, in which Mickey shows up at his workplace, angry at him because he didn’t text her back. “You’re f*cking crazy right now” are the words Gus uses. Sure, it flipped the stereotypes, but free-spirited Mickey was scripted (by a man, I should say) to break down into an overly-attached Instagram-stalking “crazy” girl. Why is that so offensive? Because he was ignoring her and she had every right to be annoyed. Because it was a man who diagnosed her “craziness”. Because we were supposed to root for them, and that makes no sense at all. The association between women’s behaviour and the notion of “craziness” is nothing new. Up until the early 20th century, “female hysteria” was a legitimate medical diagnosis for a whole range of symptoms displayed by women that encompassed supposedly “uncontrollable” emotion. “Craziness” became a gendered trait in a world where emotion has been connected to femaleness.

On the contrary, research has shown that men experience emotion just as women do. Not only is this gendered connection plain rude considering its problematic history, it also has no basis in scientific fact. In the real world of today – one that has thankfully evolved from the days of sexist scientific theory – the use of this term is problematic in that by dismissing a person’s concerns as being “crazy”, or labelling them under the same bracket, we immediately encourage that person to doubt the legitimacy of their concerns and emotions. I’ve seen the following from all kinds of women on social media, but I follow girls that are younger than me (there’s no way of saying that without sounding creepy) and their behaviour and interaction with certain ideas is even more troubling in light of this. Liking and sharing photos captioned “my husband will need one of these every day” underneath a photo of cake iced with “sorry for being psycho” conveys the fact that we, as women, are starting to accept labels like this; we’re teaching younger women that the labels we are given and then accept are just a part of our identity. You nag, you show up at his workplace, you think he’s talking to other girls, but hey, it’s cute! Just admit you were “acting crazy” the next day! As long as he loves you for the “psycho” that you are! In addition to this, there are a myriad of problems that arise in relation to adjective and its connection to mental illness. The widespread use of the term to describe women erases the reality that men can also suffer with mental illness, whilst throwing around the term as though it doesn’t connote mental instability only stigmatises those who are actually suffering. We also shouldn’t be using the term for people who do suffer. See the problem? By labelling and portraying women as “crazy”, we are effectively saying that their concerns do not fit into a certain bracket of comfort. Craziness as a label becomes nothing but a total dismissal when used to describe the actions that the media and the people around us commonly use in their portrayal of women. ‘Bitches be crazy’ is not an excuse for ignoring the feelings of women, nor is it an excuse for the film industry to cop out and play on stereotypes that are, frankly, enough to drive anyone crazy.