# Happy to be insane: Once a common urban myth? Origins? Any truth? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [August 21, 2009, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-to-be-insane-once-a-common-urban-myth-origins-any-truth/507245 "2009-08-21T21:43:57Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2009, 8:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-to-be-insane-once-a-common-urban-myth-origins-any-truth/507245/21 "2009-08-23T08:09:20Z")
> [@Koxinga](#): > > Is that true, though? [If Wikipedia is to be trusted](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sydenham), it looks like Saint Vitus Dance is associated with a specific disease that’s been identified for hundreds of years now. My apologies, I was thinking in Spanish. My grandmother still does refer to convulsions as el baile de San Vito. And only because something has been identified medically, that doesn’t mean laymen know about it. The notion that “some crazy people are happy to be crazy” isn’t exactly medical terminology, we’re very much talking about a layman’s point of view. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2009, 8:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-to-be-insane-once-a-common-urban-myth-origins-any-truth/507245/22 "2009-08-23T08:15:27Z")
**Dr. Drake** , the problem here is that “illness” has very fuzzy definitions. Middlebro and me had a few discussions with His Wife The Doctor and colleagues of hers because according to her “cancer is not a genetic illness” (why not, it’s an illness of the genes!); she insists in reserving that term for what we would have called genetic defects, but which again she would refuse to call defects, they are “illnesses” (cf. hemophilia). We ended up deciding that the logic behind what doctors consider an illness is different from the logic a layman would use. How it works, we still haven’t found out. ---
**Author:** ![anson2995](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c77e96/32.png) [@anson2995](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/anson2995)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2009, 1:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-to-be-insane-once-a-common-urban-myth-origins-any-truth/507245/23 "2009-08-23T13:49:40Z")
> [@Dr.Drake](#): > > Wait, why not? I understand that it’s not a “mental illness” in terms sanity / insanity, but why not a mental illness? It affects the mind, and it’s certainly not the healthy normal state. Both depression and mental retardation affect the ability to think, albeit in very, very different ways. I am asking out of ignorance. Is it that one group doesn’t want the other’s stigma? Is it because the treatments (therapy, medication, education, etc.) are so radically different that it’s simply not useful to consider them together? Because it is an irreversible disability, not a treatable disease. > [@AboutAsWeirdAsYouCanGet](#): > > Nope. Those are the top IDENTFIED causes…but most MR is of unknown cause. Fair enough, but I was trying to make the distinction above. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2009, 3:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-to-be-insane-once-a-common-urban-myth-origins-any-truth/507245/24 "2009-08-23T15:52:17Z")
Thanks, **Nava** and **anson2995**. That seems to presuppose that all mental illnesses are treatable, or that they aren’t disabilities. Still, that helps a lot in understanding how the distinctions are drawn. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/happy-to-be-insane-once-a-common-urban-myth-origins-any-truth/507245.md?page=1)