Person A and Person B aren't diagnossed. The problem is when person C the arbitrator is introduced. The problem is that diagnoses of mental illness because of stigma is a negative attitribute.
Consider an extreme manifestation of interpersonal conflict: one man purposefully and relentlessly harasses another until the second man snaps, striking his provocateur in the head with a baseball bat. The victim—having successfully engineered his own assault—is quietly thrilled by the outcome. The retaliator, meanwhile, is arrested, charged, and sent to jail.
When confronted with a scenario that ends in severe violence and masochistic satisfaction, the immediate societal impulse is to ask: Who is crazy in this situation?
Is it the man who orchestrates his own physical destruction just to win a psychological game? Or is it the man who allows himself to be pushed into throwing his freedom away over a provocateur’s taunts? To understand this dynamic, we must strip away the colloquial use of the word "crazy" and examine the mechanics of the conflict through the roles of Person A (the provocateur) and Person B (the reactor), and look at what happens when an arbitrator steps in to resolve what the individuals could not.
The Symbiosis of Person A and Person B
In this dynamic, Person A and Person B are not acting independently; they are locked in a toxic, symbiotic feedback loop.
Person A weaponizes vulnerability and the rules of social conduct. By harassing Person B without crossing the threshold of physical violence, Person A maintains the technical high ground while applying unbearable psychological pressure. His goal is not to avoid harm, but to manufacture a scenario where Person B becomes the undeniable aggressor. When the bat strikes his head, Person A is happy because his internal narrative has been validated: he has proven that Person B is a monster, and he has successfully manipulated the system into destroying his enemy. Person A sacrifices his physical safety to secure a moral and legal victory.
Person B, conversely, lacks the psychological endurance or emotional regulation to navigate the trap. Exhausted, humiliated, or enraged by the harassment, Person B reaches a breaking point where the immediate release of physical retaliation outweighs the long-term consequences of a felony. Person B trades his future for a single moment of absolute, primal control.
Both individuals are operating outside the bounds of healthy emotional regulation. Person A exhibits a detachment from self-preservation, while Person B exhibits a catastrophic failure of impulse control. Yet, asking "who is crazy" is a trap in itself, because the label of insanity is rarely about clinical diagnosis in these moments—it is about societal utility. In this real life example, both of these individuals had psychiatric diagnoses, but person A “got away with it.”
The Arbitrator and the Culture of Disabling
When a conflict escalates to this level, society can no longer ignore it. An arbitrator—in this case, the legal and penal system—is forced to step in.
The arbitrator does not have the capacity, nor the mandate, to untangle the deep psychological warfare that led to the swinging of the bat. The system operates on objective, physical realities. Person B committed aggravated assault with a deadly weapon; therefore, Person B is labeled the "criminal" (and colloquially, the "crazy" or dangerous one) and is removed from society. Person A suffered physical trauma; therefore, Person A is labeled the "victim."
By imposing these binary labels, the arbitrator participates in a culture of disabling people. Rather than addressing the root dysfunction, the system "disables" the participants to restore order. Person B is physically disabled by incarceration and stripped of his autonomy. Person A is psychologically disabled by the system’s validation; by officially crowning him the victim, the arbitrator shields Person A from having to confront his own severe manipulative pathology.
The label of "crazy" or "criminal" is a tool of convenience for the arbitrator. It creates a neat narrative where the complex, shared responsibility of a toxic dynamic is flattened into a one-sided offense. Society uses these labels to outsource the messy work of human reconciliation.
The Ultility of Mutual Resolution
The tragedy of this extreme scenario is that the violence, the jail time, and the pathologizing labels were all entirely avoidable.
If Person A and Person B possessed the emotional vocabulary and willingness to resolve their conflict interpersonally, the entire framework collapses. If Person A could communicate his underlying grievances or insecurities without resorting to relentless psychological torture, and if Person B could establish boundaries and communicate his limits without resorting to a weapon, the conflict would remain in the realm of normal human friction.
In a space of mutual resolution, neither individual needs to be labeled “crazy.”
Ultimately, nobody in this dynamic is inherently "crazy." They are two people who failed to manage a deeply broken interaction, relying instead on an extreme escalation to do the work of boundary-setting for them.
