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5:06am August 17, 2014
atomicapricot asked: Are mental illnesses considered disabilities? I thought they were but I'm seeing people say things like, "I'm mentally ill and disabled". It's confusing.

Yes, they are, but some people don’t see them that way.  I see them as psychiatric disabilities.  That puts it in a situation where I’m not judging whether I see them as an “illness” or not.  Because some of them are comparable to illnesses, but other ones are not, and people throw around the term ‘illness’ too freely without understanding it.  But it’s anyone’s choice what to call themselves and I won’t question that.  Especially given that when people have seen your problems as moral, medicalizing them is a step up, a huge step up.  But I see them as part neurological, part cognitive, part social, part a lot of things, not just like an illness that strikes the mind.  They are all different.  Many of them are as badly constructed as neurasthenia was as a concept in the last century, and will fall by the wayside as science steps in.  If science ever does step into abnormal psychiatry, which so far it rarely has.

But anyway.  Yes there are people who think that psychiatric disabilities aren’t real disabilities.  I strongly disagree.  All disabled people face ableism, and people with psychiatric disabilities face a whole lot of ableism.  Generally I’ll say 'people with psychiatric disabilities’ in polite company, but I may also use words like 'crazy’ and 'insane’ because they speak to my experience more than any medical-sounding title ever could.  There’s a lot of debate over whether it’s okay to do that, but I feel like with my experiences in the system I’ve earned the right to call myself whatever the fuck I please.  And crazy is more readily understood than a diagnostic term that probably doesn’t even exist in my case (as in, there is no medicalized word for what I went through).

So, yes some people think mental illness isn’t a disability.  No, I don’t agree with them in the slightest.  I don’t make the rules.  But I have direct experience with chronic illness, psychiatric disability, physical disability, cognitive disability, developmental disability, etc.  And I don’t see psychiatric disability as somehow separate from the rest of these categories in a way that makes it not-disability while others are.  I think most people who want mental illness not to be a disability are:

  • People who are afraid to call themselves disabled, especially if they’ve encountered hostility for doing so in the past.
  • Physically disabled people who don’t want other kinds of disabled people encroaching on 'their’ movements, 'their’ experiences, and the like.  They see psychiatrically disabled people as stealing something from them.  Which is wrong, and self-centered as hell.
  • People with a very narrow definition of what 'disabled’ refers to.
  • People in the mad pride movement who, like some Deaf people and some autistic people, see disability as a bad thing.  They believe that because they (like most disabled people) don’t fit a lot of negative disability stereotypes they’ve heard, it must be because their particular kind of disability is special and immune to these stereotypes. 

All of these views have a lot of drawbacks for disabled people in general and psychiatrically disabled people in particular.

Notes:
  1. raposadanoite reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone
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  5. natalunasans said: Also people who use “disabled” as a shorthand for “physically disabled” but are also dealing with psych disabilities …
  6. fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton said: I say that specifically because I don’t think people will infer ‘disabled’ from the mentally ill part. People expect me to just take pills, see a therapist, and then be able to go out in the world and get a job and do able people things.
  7. withasmoothroundstone posted this