as small as a world and as large as alone, I really liked your post about mental illness and...

8:51pm August 17, 2014

Anonymous asked: I really liked your post about mental illness and dissabilities, but I wanted to add that tourette syndrome and epilepsy are neurological dissorders, which are a totally different thing. Thanks!

Then you may not have understood why I included them. They are conditions that have been, historically, claimed as both mental illness and developmental disabilities. To this day, some kinds of epilepsy are treated as a mental illness, and many kinds of epilepsy are classified even officially as developmental disabilities. Tourette syndrome is treated as both psychiatric and developmental. This is real. This is how these things are classified. You could say the same of half the things on my list, because that was the entire point.

The entire point is that the category “psychiatric disability” and the category “developmental disability” are almost entirely meaningless categories. They are categories that have evolved, next to each other, often overlapping, as an accident of history. Some disorders get ejected from one or the other eventually – epilepsy is almost but not entirely ejected from psychiatry, when it used to be seen as psychiatric in nature, and Tourette’s is on its way out but not there yet. But which disorders get ejected doesn’t have anything to do with them being special disorders that are more neurological and less psychiatric than other ones, it also has to do with accidents of history.

So I didn’t really need to be told “This and that is actually a neurological disorder.” Because half of the psychiatric disorders could be pulled out of psychiatric and pulled into neurology if anyone really wanted to do it. It’s all a big game of categorization, it has nothing to do with objective reality.

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