Even the best media can't avoid treating mental illness like a horror show

Even The Associated Press isn't immune to promoting stigma.

Here's a story about a person who's accused of killing his therapist. Count the number of mental health stereotypes that the clever reporter and editor managed to weave into the text.

The point is: Can we find another way of describing people with mental illness without resorting to adjectives and verbs that are best reserved for a horror movie?

Here's the story (stereotypes are in bold):

A lawyer for a mental patient accused of hacking a Manhattan psychotherapist to death with a meat cleaver said Tuesday that his client will offer an insanity defense at his trial.

Defense lawyer Bryan Konoski said in Manhattan's state Supreme Court that a psychiatrist he hired to examine murder suspect David Tarloff, 40, said he has "very strong grounds" for a psychiatric defense (above photo: Tarloff).

Konoski's court papers say he will offer evidence of Tarloff's "lack of criminal responsibility by reason of mental disease or defect." They also say Tarloff suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, depression, intrusive delusional thoughts of God and Satan, belief he is the Messiah and other mental disorders.

Tarloff, who told police he has been in mental institutions at least 20 times, is charged with first- and second-degree murder in the death of Kathryn Faughey, 56, in her Upper East Side office on Feb. 12, 2008.

Tarloff is also charged with attempted murder and first-degree assault in the cleaver attack on Dr. Kent Shinbach, 70, who was hurt when he tried to help Faughey. Shinbach, whose office was near Faughey's, was Tarloff's therapist.

Konoski said "the evidence is clear that he (Tarloff) did it, but the reasons he did it, what was behind it, are so crazy that we believe we have a very strong insanity defense."

"He was having visual and auditory hallucinations, communications with God telling him how to act," Konoski said. "He believed through prayer that God had approved what he was going to do at Dr. Shinbach's office to save his mother."

The lawyer said Tarloff, who is being held in the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital, was examined there by his psychiatrist for eight to 10 hours on Feb. 27 and four to five hours on March 28.

Here's the definition of mental, when it's used in the above context:

Slang - Emotionally upset; crazed: "got mental when he saw the dent in his new car."
Offensive Slang - Mentally or psychologically disturbed.

So, what's mental?

Are people who take psychotropic medicine "crazed?" Are people who go see psychotherapists or seek treatment at a facility "disturbed?"

Personally, the only thing I ever like to "hack" is any story that compares mentally ill behavior to Frankenstein.