I met Floyd in the summer of 1987, in my first institution, when I was 20. He was a social worker; he worked in the day program my unit was assigned to. I don’t usually get on too well with social workers, but I will always remember Floyd, who had a powerful influence on who I became.

Floyd taught a class whose actual name is lost to me, but I always thought of it as “DSM Etiquette.” He just cycled through the DSM-III, hitting the diagnoses you were likely to encounter in that place, over and over (there was a lot of turnover on that unit), telling us about them.

I’ve been in other classes that could be described similarly — I had already taken Abnormal Psych in college and later I would attend other trainings — but I’ve never seen anyone else do what Floyd did. And that’s a loss, because what Floyd did was amazing.

He wasn’t teaching us “insight” into our own official diagnoses. He was teaching us insight into how to get along together.

The example I remember most clearly was paranoid schizophrenia. Now, I’m not going to offer a deficit framing of paranoid schizophrenia here. You can find those all over the place. I’m going to tell you what Floyd told us.

If all you know about someone is that the nursing staff says they have paranoid schizophrenia, Floyd told us — the rules around confidentiality back then were different — then here’s what you know about them: they get told they are wrong an awful lot. Everybody is always telling them that things they see, or things they hear, aren’t real, or that things they are certain of aren’t true.

He asked those of us without the label to imagine what that might be like. What if, every time you talked about your dad, or your job, or something that you had experienced, everyone wanted to try to get you to agree that really you were wrong. He isn’t really your dad, you don’t really do that kind of work, this thing you remember with perfect clarity never really happened.

It would get old really fast.

It would interfere with the way you felt, the way you got along with the people around you, whether you felt supported or as if there was nobody whom you could count on.

He asked us to trust him that, if we were concerned that someone hear that we thought certain things were delusions or hallucinations, that was already covered. Institution staff were already telling people they were wrong. Families were telling them. Strangers were telling them. They heard it plenty. So we could let it go.

He wasn’t counseling us to lie, he stressed. If we were asked a direct question, like “Do you see that dragon?” or “Do you believe that the FBI is looking for me?” we should offer a direct answer. But if we weren’t asked, we could just opt not to talk about the dragon or the FBI. There are plenty of other things to talk about. It would be less stressful for the person with the label; it would promote a more comfortable community. And we might make friends.

Over the years I have known a number of people who believed things I did not believe — the sorts of things the Abnormal Psych instructors called “delusions.” I knew people who witnessed things I did not even when we were together — the sorts of things the Abnormal Psych instructors called “hallucinations.” I did not believe that the woman who sang to me on bad days had truly been impregnated with the Second Coming of the Son of God. I did not see the attackers the man we called “Shadow” fought off before they got down the hall to the rest of us in the first days that we knew him. I did not believe that a gas station attendant I knew was secretly doing advanced theoretical physics for the CIA, or that the reason no doctor ever found the implants another friend’s parents had arranged to have surgically placed in them was that those same parents had paid off every doctor in the city. But I also never pointed that out to people.

It is equally possible that others did not believe things I said: for awhile I had a paranoid schizophrenia diagnosis as a result of my belief that my father worked for the federal government (the payroll office agreed with me, by the way, but apparently that was just too paradigmatic a delusion for anyone to check). They never said.

We talked about other things, things about which we had a number of shared beliefs.

There are times when it is important to speak your truth as loudly and clearly as you can. And there are times to shut up and not start arguments.

I thought about Floyd the time I tried to watch the movie Conspiracy Theory, in which Mel Gibson is dismissed as he tells people preposterous things (some of which turn out to be true), and dissolved into flashbacks. I thought about him when I watched Population 436, in which Jeremy Sisto visits a small town to investigate a census anomaly and discovers that the locals share a ridiculous (but possibly true) belief. In both cases the main character is treated as both wrong and ill; in one case the audience tends to agree with the protagonist.

The reality is that we all believe things that are not true. We all have beliefs that do not serve us well. So even if we are right (which we aren’t always) about who has which false beliefs, that doesn’t mean they are fundamentally different from us. And when we start trying to coerce people into agreeing with the majority about things like what their lives are like, we stop treating them with the respect that is owed to people just because they are people.

Other people have viewpoints and perspectives. They may be different from ours. They may be so different from ours that they are incomprehensible. They may contain factual errors — in fact, they certainly contain factual errors, because everyone is mistaken about some things. This does not mean they don’t come from somewhere. It does not make them nonsensical, or unworthy of taking seriously, because people and their understandings of the world are worth taking seriously.

And because when you are not taken seriously on a regular enough basis, harm is done to you. When you are presumed incompetent, when you are treated as the inferior of the person or people you are contending with, once, you can laugh it off. Twice, you can laugh it off. But it erodes something in you, a little bit each time, until that thing is diminished.

That was Floyd’s genius, as I see it. In a place where diagnostic labels, and even the mere status of patient, encouraged our diminishment from persons to something less, in the face of the human tendency to try to reestablish personhood by distinguishing ourselves from the allegedly lesser beings with whom we have been lumped, he encouraged us not to see past the labels to each other’s humanity, but to use the labels themselves, which were often all we knew about newcomers besides their given names, as jumping-off points for empathy, as starting points for relationships.

Anyway. That was Floyd. I think of him at least weekly, all these decades later, with gratitude.