Plenty of people who suffer from a mental illness do well in life, but you’re right that they often have a harder time. So then why should we actively make their life even harder by attaching a stigma and dehumanizing them? I don’t think that’s progressive as much as just humanitarian.
Imagine a hypothetical scenario: two of your coworkers are in an office and one tells the other something shocking. The second says, “Wow, that’s crazy!” Do you think that’s a micro aggression, or worse, a slur?
Second scenario: you’re talking to a coworker and they say “Bob has been off recently. Some of the stuff he says is so insane. Yesterday he completely embarrassed us in that meeting!” Do you think this is any less hurtful to Bob because your coworker said “insane” instead of “crazy”?
My answers are “no” and “no”, and it seems pretty obvious why. In the first scenario there’s no intention to harm someone and even if harm is done, it’s extremely small. In the second scenario, your coworker is going to say something bad about Bob and it doesn’t matter how tightly you control the corporate Newspeak, he is going to express his opinion.
Grow a spine and realize the world isn’t for or against you, it just is.
Reality is that life kind of sucks for people who take care of or interact with the mentally ill, and it definitely sucks more for the mentally ill themselves… No amount of progressive hand-wringing or administrative Band-aids is going to change that.
Banning the word crazy is silly, ineffective, patronizing nonsense that does nothing to help the mentally ill whatsoever, not even changing the perception around them nor making them feel better.