Originally posted by Sailor Saturn
I understand about the disorders and all that, but what exactly is the definition of insanity? Webster's Dictionary says, for the first definition, that insanity is unsoundness or disorder of the mind; mental illness. For the disorders you refer to, CE, insanity is a viable definition; but not everything that some people consider a disorder or unsoundness of the mind is insanity. Webster goes on to say that insanity is extreme folly or unreasonableness. That is more subjective than 'unsoundness of the mind.' Who decides what is 'extreme folly' or 'unreasonableness'? People certainly consider me unreasonable, likely even extremely unreasonable. I don't consider myself to be particularly unreasonable. In fact, I tend to find that those very people who call me unreasonable are the ones being unreasonable. So who's insane? Me or them? 
I won't argue that there are not people who are insane in a bad way. There is plenty of proof that there are. However, there is also "insanity" that is not bad.
Webster's dictionary defines "sane" as "mentally sound and healthy." What does it mean to be "mentally sound"? All I've ever seen to say what that is says that it means you don't "think outside the box," that you only think things that are agreed upon by the "majority" as sane. Well, I certainly don't fit this definition, and I don't want to. So, given the choice, I'd rather be insane.
My use of the term "insane" versus "mentally healthy" is rather strict (apart from joking, of course). IMO the term "mentally sound and healhty" should not be equal to "normal", although I know some people use it that way. But when used that way the concept healthy and ill looses it's meaning IMO, since health then becomes a question of what is accepable in a certain group or society. "Normal" is just a statistical contruct, derived from what is considered "average" in a certain culture at a certain time, and it's dangerous to mix up "normal" and "according to majority" with "ill, insane, crazy" since that becomes a way of disrespecting and sometimes even discriminating people who happen to be deviating from standard norms. Only 80 years ago, the mental hospitals were still full of people who were not at all ill, only not behaving as their familes demanded them to.
IMO neither you or the people who call you unreasonable are insane, unless either of you fulfulls the strict critera of psychiatric disorder. Joking is one thing, but if somebody calls you insane, I think you should say "no, I might be behaving in a way you don't view as normal, but that doesn't mean I'm not healthy" or something do that effect.
Not behaving according to set standards should IMO not lead to us accepting that other people view us as insane.
I come to think of one of my patients at the ward where I worked, a young man who had volontarity seeked our help because his partner, his boss and his colleagues insisted that he was insane. After a rather long examination of his situation, his background and his thoughs and behaviour, I came to the conclusion that this man was not insane at all - other people viewed him as insane because he had expressed a lot of critisism at his work that led him to have conflicts with other people, and his partner thought he was insane because the partner viewed his critisism as unfounded. However, when I investigated the accusations my patients had expressed towards his boss, they turned out to be true - it was quite pathetic really that all the misdoings of the company was easy to confirm objectively. It seemed like my patients boss has just tried to proclaim my patient was insane in order to make nobody listen to him and hide the dirty affairs of the company. The the boss instead accused my patient of being the cause for all the problems. However, I declared my patient healthy, and the company went on to court. (The company in question was a health care company who provided service to disabled people, but it turned out they had abused the employees rights by threatening them to works extremely long hours, otherwise they would be fired. They had also neglected their clients, not providing the service they had agreed on.)
However, I have also met many patients claming they are not insane but the surroundings unfairly believe they are. Both the patients and his/her surroundings must of course be investigated, and sometimes it's a mix between problems within the patient and problems in the surrounding, and sometimes nothing special at all can be found around a patient, but the patient still thinks the mafia, extra-terrestrials, CIA, KGB and the whole world are conspiring against them and send messages through the plummings or whatever. Many schizophrenic patients have paranoid ideas like that, and schizophrenia is certainly a very severe, clearly identifyable neuropsychiatric disorder
