5:25pm May 25, 2014

#ActuallyDD

I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but I’ve started posting on this tag. It’s meant to mirror tags like #actuallyautistic and #actuallyADHD, and I’m not really sure if anyone’s going to be interested in posting on it or not. But I figured if I don’t tell people it’s there, nobody will post on it.

Basically it’s the same as any other #actually[anything] tag. Don’t post there if you don’t have a developmental disability. (That means if you’re a parent, sibling, caregiver, etc., do not post there unless you also yourself happen to have a developmental disability.)

I hate to try to define developmental disability, because it’s really a sociological category more than it is a medical category. It’s a group of people who’ve become linked together by a common history in certain cultures, rather than a group of people who all innately have specific things in common. But I’ll try to describe the legalistic definition of developmental disability just so you have an idea who might be posting in this tag.

So…

A developmental disability is usually defined as:

Starting at birth or in childhood (before the age of 22, is usually the cutoff)
Causing difficulties in at least a couple areas of daily living (generally called adaptive behavior). A fairly standard list of these areas is: communication. self-care, home living, social/interpersonal skills, use of community resources, self-direction, functional academic skills, work, leisure, health, and safety.
Not a psychiatric condition or a specific learning disability (although those things can go along with it).

That last bit shows you how arbitrary it is in some ways, both “developmental disability” and “psychiatric disability” have a lot more to do with accidents of history than shared physical traits.

The most commonly named developmental disabilities are:

Intellectual disabilities (used to be known as mental retardation)
Autistic spectrum conditions
Cerebral palsy
Muscular dystrophy
Childhood brain injury or stroke
Fetal alcohol spectrum conditions
Childhood epilepsy

But there are lots of others. Many states have a thing where they’ll give DD services to people under certain diagnoses (autism, epilepsy, CP, ID) and then have another category that’s a catch-all for basically “anything that causes functioning issues similar to the ones that are named”.

Sometimes there’s conditions that seem to be considered a developmental disability sometimes but not others – ADHD, Tourette’s, blindness, and deafness, for instance. I have no idea how that works. Also there’s a lot of conditions called ‘neurodevelopmental disabilities’. If you fall under any of those categories and feel like you have a DD, that’s fine.

But basically if you feel like you fit under the category of DD, I’m not going to sit here and be some kind of gatekeeper. The government does enough of that. I won’t try to chase you out. The only time I’d have a problem with someone being here, is if they didn’t have a disability and were just here because they had a child with a disability, or a friend with a disability, or were a caregiver, and somehow felt it was their right to come here, because such people often feel like it’s their right to barge into places that are only for disabled people ourselves.

And just like most people in #actuallyautistic, I’m not going to chase away people who are self-diagnosed, either. And if you’re unsure of whether you fit, it’s fine to post here. As long as you’re posting in good faith, that’s all anyone can ask. The only people who are specifically unwelcome are people who know they aren’t DD and are posting here anyway because they just feel like they have a right to for whatever reason.

The tag is just for anyone who has any developmental disability of any kind and feels for some reason like they want to post in this tag. It may be I’m the only person who’s ever interested in posting here, or it may not. But I thought it would be interesting to tell people about the tag and see if anything happens.

Notes: