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12:05pm November 26, 2013

madeofpatterns:

soilrockslove:

madeofpatterns:

soilrockslove:

madeofpatterns:

And yeah for some of us it’s really, really important to have non-medical words to describe stuff.

And this isn’t ableist and it doesn’t mean the stuff we struggle with is mild.

For most things that are a part of everyday, normal life - they have a medical word and *at least one* non-medical word. 

Vertigo and dizziness, scapula and shoulder blade, penis and (insert all the words you know here, I bet there’s at least 5).

Having non-medical and slang-y words is part of *life*.  (And sometimes they’re better because they have a different worldview attached which is more down-to-earth.)

I don’t mean non-medical in that sense. I mean non-medical in the sense of “not treating it as a medical concept” and words that *don’t* have an exact medical translation.

It’s… “Crazy” isn’t just a colloquial term for “mental illness”, it means things that people need to say who would never call themselves mentally ill.

Yes! That too!

Medical and non-medical ways of describing things can be totally different.  And the non-medical ways are important.  And can have a lot of richness and important things to say (especially because a lot of them have been around longer than the current “medical model”).

And cutting people away from being able to describe things in cultural terms. (And from describing things in their own language.) Is cutting them off from an important part of *life*.

“You can only describe your life as a medical/psychiatric condition” is BS.  Very limiting.  I’m tired of it.  And it gets shoved at disabled people all the time.  Everyone should have *choices*.

(I think I was trying to get to that originally, but not doing a very good job.)

Partly that, yes.

But also… psychiatry overreaches. Tries to lay claim to a whole range of vaguely-related things, only some of which are medical in nature.

And then people say you can only talk about the things if you’re using medical language or else it’s a reclaimed slur which you can only use if you *could* use medical language.

But a lot of people can’t or shouldn’t. For reasons that have nothing to do with severity or aversion to stigma. For reasons having to do with what’s actually true.