In a recent interview, the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, was asked what his day actually looks like. He gave an honest, vivid answer — a safety conversation with a policymaker in the morning, a technical discussion about computing resources, recording an explainer for a new feature, then a tense one-on-one with someone upset at him, all before lunch. And then he reached for one word to sum it up: schizophrenic. Twice.

I want to be clear that this is not about attacking him. He was describing genuine whiplash, the kind many of us feel in a packed day. The problem isn't his honesty. It's the word he chose to carry it.

Why this small choice carries weight

Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness. It is not a synonym for a chaotic, fast-switching schedule. When someone with a large audience — someone people watch, follow and quietly aspire to be — uses a clinical diagnosis to mean 'all over the place', the meaning of that diagnosis softens for everyone listening. The word stops sounding like an illness people live with and starts sounding like a casual exaggeration.

We don't do this with other conditions, and noticing that is the quickest way to feel the discomfort. We don't say a messy afternoon was 'a bit AIDS', or that a difficult task was 'a little cancerous'. Those words feel obviously wrong in everyday speech because we treat the conditions they name with seriousness. Mental illness deserves exactly the same care. The fact that 'schizophrenic', 'bipolar', 'OCD' and 'depressed' slip out so easily tells you how casually we've come to hold them.

What language does underneath the conversation

As someone who works with people in therapy and studies how we communicate, I see the cost up close. Language is not just decoration on top of meaning — it shapes what we believe is normal and what we feel safe admitting. When clinical words become throwaway descriptions for ordinary moods and busy days, two things happen at once.

  • The condition gets trivialised — a real, often frightening experience gets reduced to a punchline or a filler word.
  • The person living with it gets isolated — because if 'schizophrenic' just means a hectic Tuesday, where does that leave someone genuinely managing schizophrenia? They hear their reality used as a joke and learn, quietly, to stay silent.

That silence is the real damage. People already hesitate to speak about their mental health. Every casual misuse adds one more reason to keep it hidden.

What to say instead

The good news is that the fix is simple, and it doesn't make you sound stiff. The English language is full of accurate, expressive alternatives for exactly what Mosseri was describing.

  • For a fast-switching, fragmented day: 'whiplash', 'scattered', 'pulled in ten directions', 'all over the place'.
  • For chaos: 'frantic', 'overwhelming', 'a blur'.
  • For mood swings in a situation: 'unpredictable', 'up and down'.

None of these borrow someone's diagnosis to make a point. They're vivid and they're honest, which is all he was trying to be.

The bigger ask

I'd make one request, the same one I'd make of anyone with a microphone and an audience: keep clinical words for clinical realities. Not out of fear of saying the wrong thing, but out of respect for the people who carry these conditions every day. The more carefully we hold these words, the safer it becomes for someone to finally say, 'I'm actually struggling,' and be heard properly — not mistaken for someone describing a busy morning.

Small word, big ripple. That's usually how language works.