I think there needs to be a radical new understanding of "crazy".

There first off, needs to be acceptance, tolerance, and the understanding that "crazy" ISN'T any different in many ways than said physical medical conditions - that you can still have a good life even though you have mental illness X.

Second, I think there is a whole lot of "good" crazy in many of us. By which I mean, sure, we struggle, but we don't do anything that is out of our normal moral character or harmful to anyone else. I myself, for example, spent a whole lot of money, more than I have, on "fixing myself" - in the process, I spent a lot on bikes, clothes, etc. It wasn't a great choice financially, but, it did serve a purpose - it was about self-preservation, about having hope, about improving myself, about being better than I thought I was at the time. So yeah, in one sense, I'll pay a negative price, but in another, I'm NOT sorry I did it - I was willing to pay ANY price to "fix myself" and actually, in a lot of ways, I've gone pretty far down that road.

There was a time when just asking the quesition I asked and saying "I want to hear people tell me being MI doesn't make you a bad person" would have been utterly unthinkable to - because I was completely convinced having a MI did make me a horrible person, scum of the earth and worthy of execution, and I applied a lesser but still stigmatizing standard to others - I didn't feel it made other people with MI bad, but I felt "sorry for the poor devils who were so afflicted" and I honestly did think, with perhaps a few exceptions, that people with any kind of significant MI were "beyond hope" and that all of the talk of "management" was pretty much just "feel good talk" to mask the truth, that it was hopeless.