6:45pm July 27, 2012

➸ Ableism in the autism community

youneedacat:

squidids:

goldenheartedrose:

Autistic Hoya gets it right once again.

Trigger warning for ableism and ableist slurs.

I say “crazy” and “nuts,” etc. Most people I know with mental illness use these words, are ok with people using these words, and in fact find them very useful as long as they’re used the “right” way (as in, not to categorize a human being’s thoughts as not valid or worth caring about, simply by virtue if the fact that it’s that particular human being wins thinking them). These words preceded the modern concept of mental illness and describe a useful range of concepts that many people with mental illness NEED to be able to express.

Sorry it’s just… this feels roughly equivalent to being schooled on prior first language. I know it’s not intended. But that’s what it’s like to me.

I feel similar about that half of the post. I’m a former mental patient, as are most of my friends (and some currently are, too) and we use these words.

Besides that, I am one of the very few people who can say that within the last two decades, idiot is a word that was actually written on my diagnostic paperwork. As in idiot savant qualities. And I am not offended by most usages of idiot, stupid, etc.

Here is a rough guide to what I find offensive, and what I don’t. Note that what I find offensive isn’t the word itself, but the intentions and concepts beneath the word, that the particular context reveals.

The r-word is a slur all but a tiny percentage of the time. Idiot and stupid are not usually slurs, though some people treat them as such.

When people clearly use the word idiot the same way they use the r-word, I have problems with it. Like, when they make their voice grow dull, flap their hand against their chest with a bent wrist, and use the word idiot. In that context I see it (and any other word, no matter how innocent in other contexts) as clearly ableist.

(…oh yeah, and I’m also one of the kinds of people who uses words like crazy and insane and mad to describe some of my own past experiences. And I don’t mind if other people use them, either, unless it’s to insult me or to mean “because you had this experience, your perceptions are completely untrustworthy.” But you can do that by using all sorts of clinical terms, and most of the people I’ve seen who do it, are using “correct” clinical language.)

I’ve had that exact same experience. Where people who really wanted to get to me, would do so by using excruciatingly “correct” clinical language. As in, not just diagnosis. But also very precise language describing my presumed thought processes and dissecting my statements to “prove” why nothing I said could be trusted.

One of the worst involved someone explaining why nothing I said about my own life could possibly be meaningful, except possibly to gain insight into the workings of my disease. Or something like that. She said it in a way that was perfectly packaged in psychiatric terminology and tied up with a bow. And experiences like that – both in real psychiatric contexts and in the context of random people being cruel to me – have been worse for me than ever being taunted with crazy, loony, psycho, etc. ever was.

Another experience like that was really weird. Because I was talking to this stranger I’d never met. And he started following me around message boards trying to prove I’m not really autistic. And the way he would do it. Was he would take autistic traits I was blatantly displaying in talking to him. And he would “repackage” them using psychiatric terminology, to try to make me look as pathological as possible.

So he would rag on me for having “repetitive” writing. Any claim I made to understanding autism, became “grandiose”. Even in cases where all the research was on my side or researchers themselves had valued my contributions to their understanding of autism. But mentioning that fact became “narcissistic”. Sticking to the same subjects became “obsessive”. Believing I had a right to be treated as fairly as anyone else became “entitlement”. So many times I wanted to scream at him “I’m obsessive and repetitive because I’m autistic, you asshole!” but things like that never went anywhere good. He may have also used “delusional” – a word that packs quite a punch.

And the use of this kind of proper terminology can in many cases be worse than the use of words like crazy. At its worst, crazy calls you a name and sets you apart. Whereas psychiatric terminology easily has the capacity to bore into the inside of your mind and begin labeling perfectly innocent or understandable things as pathological. Which both manipulates you, and manipulates bystanders into interpreting you in the same way. At its worst, it is an insidious form of emotional abuse that distorts everything about you into something unreal.

I may have been wrong in my last post when I said I couldn’t think of a term for crazy that cuts to the heart of being considered subhuman in the way that ree-tard does. It’s not the slang terms. It’s all there in the official terminology. Not that the official terminology is always used in that fashion. Just that it easily can be. And often is. In mental institutions they used leather and canvas straps to tie your body to a table or a bed and physically treat you as subhuman. But to mentally pin you down and treat you as subhuman they always used the official words, not slang. And those official words cut you down to your core, just like ree-tard does.

Scarily, I know several people who went into the business just so they could have this kind of power over their patients. (One of them was one of the people I described above. Who loved using this terminology as freely as possible on people they knew.) Which says a lot about the power of official terminology in the world of psychiatry and psychology.

And no. I am not calling for anyone to quit using the official terminology. Just for people to stop deliberately using it to hurt other people. If you’re not doing that, you’re not the problem. If you are trying to hurt people, you’re not likely to listen to me. So perhaps the only people this is useful to, are the ones who are using it in ways they don’t realize can hurt people, so they can be careful how and when to say these things. And also to the ones being hurt by it, because it can be important to understand the source of that “I am worse than nobody” feeling when confronted by this stuff.

Notes: