Justin Timberlake took "sexy back". Okay, fair enough. But where had it gone? And why did JT earn the right to get it back? Had sexy become a commodity, a style, trend, or fad? Was it demode, but now a la? I suppose if "sexy" gets stickily emeshed in a Tom Selleck mustache and snug slacks with just a hint of lycra, then sexy can come and go. But it is my understanding that sexy describes an ongoing, flexible dynamic, one that flows, shifts, changes between people, eras, and cultures.

Reading through a NYTimes piece on the "Mad Pride" movement, I started think about "crazy back." Mad pride is about debunking the stigma of mental illness. Like gay pride and race pride movements before it, it seems to be taking an in-your-face approach to confront and demistify. This approach is likely necessary to shock some people out of their ignorance and anxieties re: mental illness.

However, I hope that crazy back will eventually take a more integrative course. Some of the great biopsychosociially oriented theorists (that is to say psychological theorists who value the importance of biological and social interactions and development) like Erickson and Harry Stack Sullivan, as well as old school Freudians, have made it clear that mental illness can be understood on a spectrum. For example, extreme paranoia in a person with schizophrenia can be viewed as an extrapolation of suspicion in a person without diagnosed mental illness. While there is a huge caveat here (do not minimize severe symptoms of mental illness, their risks, or physiological underpinnings), we can use this spectrum to better understand, empathize, and relate to thought processes and feelings inherent in people with mental illness. Taking crazy back, hopefully, will not have to be solely the charge of the people with diagnosed psychiatric disorders, but the empathetic duty of all citizens to recognize and wrestle with traits in themselves that are on the spectrum from "normal" to "crazy".

During the Elliot Spitzer issue, a Washington Post reporter called me to comment on what would make a man with such power and reptutation risk everything for a paid fling. I explained that we all carry some yin and yang, and that the very doubts and insecurities that might drive a man to strive and achieve a certain success could, in another situation, drive him to embrace his shame and doubts and succomb to self sabotage (a little unconsious masochism, perhaps). We all have this capacity, nothing shocking. "I don't think my readers would like hearing that," sniped the reporter. "Well," I said, "your readers have some work to do." GD