This sums it up
"It's easy to say you're "having a panic attack" when you're just a bit stressed, but we should watch to make sure that the meaning of words that refer to serious mental health conditions isn't diluted.
Using bipolar or schizo or essentially technical words to describe mundane or everyday experiences means the original technical meaning of the term becomes diluted and it becomes more strongly associated with these simpler or more fleeting experiences. It normalizes illness. The potential problem is that 'I'm depressed' now means 'I'm sad.' Then how does someone who actually has depression describe his or her illness or how he or she feels? How can people differentiate the much more complex, much more intense thing they have from this thing everyone always claims ownership of?"
Ableist language like this matters because when people apply an illness to themselves, they don't have to deal with it daily.
There's something to be said for how it makes sufferers feel; they're going through something stigmatized and often debilitating, while people are essentially being collectively flippant about it. Emily Reynolds is working on a book about mental health. Even she struggles when people misuse the term. "I know people don't mean to do it and it's thoughtlessness rather than spite, but it just wounds me a little bit every time and makes me feel I can't trust that person," she explained. "I'm happy to call out family or friends, but sometimes, at work, for example, you just can't. [When] people throw around 'I feel so manic' or 'he's so bipolar,' I just feel awkward about my diagnosis. Even with my level of willingness to talk about it, I feel small and awkward."
The issue goes deeper than individual feelings. "If we come to understand mental illness as something everybody has on a weekly basis, it facilitates the attitude of 'just snap out of it,'" says Dr. Demjen. "That in turn actually facilitates stigma because then if someone does have OCD, say, in the clinical sense—see, even I'm having to specify clinical here because already we have this dilution in language—his or her symptoms end up not being taken as seriously as they should be."
Dr. Demjen talks about something else called negative evaluation, which happens when we refer to other people being bipolar or OCD. "When people say that, they don't mean the person is clinically ill. They mean their behavior isn't seen as positive. And again, if you take the idea that words acquire and change meaning, then bipolar or OCD acquires this negative association. Then people who are diagnosed with one of these illnesses perceive it as a negative evaluation and judgement of themselves rather than a neutral diagnosis. This facilitates the stigma that they feel and also the potential stigma that others might impose on them because they also have the same associations. If someone goes to their employer and tells them, 'I'm depressed,' the employer has those associations as well." It's a vicious cycle.
Kate Nightingale from Time to Change, the mental health anti-stigma campaign run by Mind and Rethink Mental Illness, says it's down to both individuals and larger communities to consider their words. "Having a mental health problem is hard enough—hearing it trivialized makes it unnecessarily harder. You probably don't mean to stigmatize or hurt someone with a mental health problem—so we'd encourage everyone to think twice about the possible impact of using mental health language in such a casual way." When you speak, say what you mean.
It's not about taking over language and deciding who can say what. It's about having a word to express to people who don't understand what is affecting us. Many find being diagnosed and given a term for their illness empowering; they can go online and research their illness, the science, and the facts. They can hang onto that word when they're having a bad patch. Within the mental health community, the word has immense power. Satiating these words will eventually make them meaningless to everyone"