According to the Idaho Reporter Brad Iverson-Long tells us, “Democratic Sen. Les Bock introduced a plan Monday afternoon in a Senate committee to get rid of outdated words related mostly to mental disabilities. “Right now we use mentally retarded, we use mentally deficient,” Bock said. Three separate statutes use the word retarded. “There’s also one use of idiot and one use of lunatic.”
Language can be a very sensitive part of our own reality and impacts our life on a daily basis as some of us have different interpretations of the meaning in a word. One very ‘decorated’ psychiatrist by the name of Thomas Szasz M.D. has long informed us how the game of ’semantics’ literally plays with our heads. In his publication, “IDIOTS, INFANTS, AND THE INSANE”: MENTAL ILLNESS AND LEGAL INCOMPETENCE, Szasz gives us a brief synopsis on mental incompetence or lack of understanding which is deemed as the “idiot” in some of our Idaho laws. Words can really play havoc on some of us. One of my favorite quotes by Thomas Szasz M.D.:
“If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritulist; If God talks to you you are a schizophrenic.”
Szasz was also the Co-Founder of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights in 1969.
I applaud Les Bock for moving forward to bring Idaho up to date. He has a lot of work to do. Les Bock is on the Idaho Senate Judiciary, Agricultural, and Health and Welfare committees. He is an attorney and a Democrat from District 16.
This is definitely a step in the right direction. Another law that needs looked at is I.C.32-801 - Insanity as a ground for divorce. The law still uses terminology as “regularly confined in an insane asylum,” a special chapter devoted to insanity but fails to look at other “incurable and permanent” conditions such as diabetes, cancer, obesity, or emphysema that are apparent for three or more years. How about a divorce for those? Very archaic language and rings of cuckoo bells, needs looked at again.
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