10:44am August 18, 2014

Things You Can do to Help Disabled People That Don’t Cost A Cent

Do not talk about an obviously disabled person in front of them as if they can’t hear or understand you.

Do not talk to a disabled person’s companion instead of them.

Ask permission before touching people, or their wheelchairs/other equipment. Even if you want to help.

Ask disabled people about their lives and really listen to their answers. (Within reason. Asking people personal questions about their sex lives, for example, is rude unless you are very close to them and they’ve communicated they’re OK with that).

Listen to what they say whether they are speaking, writing, typing, using text to speech, using a letterboard, using PECS, gesturing, using sign language, or using any other form of communication. People who cannot speak can still communicate.

Stand up for people you see getting bullied.

Understand that disabled people don’t just need friends, they can be friends, too.

Every public place does not need to have loud, blaring music and TVs with flashing screens.

If you blog, put bright, flashing images that can trigger seizures under a cut so that people with seizures can avoid looking at them.

If a job can possibly be done without a person driving, don’t require candidates to drive/have a driver’s license, and don’t interview candidates and then reject them because they don’t drive.

When talking to someone who has trouble speaking or stutters, and takes a long time to speak, wait for them to answer. Don’t keep repeating the question or pressuring them. Yes, if you’re like me and your mind is going really fast and you forget what people are saying if they take too long, it can be hard to be patient. Do it anyway.

If you are talking to a deaf person, make it easier for them to lip-read by facing towards them while looking at them, and not covering your mouth with your hands.

If you are talking to someone with hearing impairment or auditory processing disorder, it is more helpful to slow down or rephrase what you’re saying than to just speak more loudly.

Some disabled people have difficulty understanding nonliteral language such as metaphors and idioms (e.g., “a stitch in time saves nine”). If you’re talking to someone like this, try explaining what you mean by these figures of speech, or just not using them.

Recognize that failure to make eye contact does not mean someone is lying to you. It may be uncomfortable for them.

Recognize that unwillingness to go out to loud, crowded bars does not mean someone isn’t interested in socializing with you.

If people have difficulty spelling, or using the appropriate jargon/terminology for your social group, do not assume they’re stupid. You may need to paraphrase some “jargon” for them.

Recognize that a person can need time alone and it doesn’t mean they don’t like you or want to be with you. It’s just something they need so they can function at their best.

If a person does not recognize you, do not assume they don’t care about you. They may be face-blind.

If a person does not remember your birthday (or other major names, numbers, or dates) do not assume they don’t care about you. They may simply have a bad memory.

Understand that a disabled person’s talents, however esoteric, are real, not unimportant “splinter skills.”

Colorblindness affects more than just knowing what color something is. To a colorblind person, colors that they can’t see will look the same if they have the same degree of lightness/darkness. That means that to a red-green colorblind person, a red rose on a green background will blend in instead of contrast starkly, and the Chicago CTA El map will be difficult to understand. Understand that something that stands out to you and seems obvious may literally not be visible to a colorblind person.

Accept stimming.

Don’t tell them “but you look so normal.” But, if they accomplish something you know they were working really hard to do, it’s great to compliment them on it.

Understand that a person can be working incredibly hard to do something and may still not perform as well as you’d like them to, as well as the average person would, or as well as the situation demands.

If someone has a major medical problem, disability, or chronic illness, then just eating some special healthy diet or exercising more isn’t going to cure it. It might help, it might hurt, it might do nothing, but they’ve probably heard it before, and it’s none of your business in any case.

A person with OCD knows that checking or counting or whatever compulsion they perform won’t really prevent disaster from happening, it’s just a compulsion. That doesn’t stop them from feeling the need to do it anyway. A person with anxiety may know at least some of their fears are irrational or unlikely to occur. That doesn’t stop them from feeling anxious. A person with trichotillomania may know it hurts them to pull out their hair or pick at their skin, but they have trouble stopping themselves anyway. A depressed person may know they would feel better if they got out of their house and talked to people, but that doesn’t make them feel any more up to doing those things. A person who hallucinates may know the hallucinations aren’t real, but that doesn’t make them go away or feel less upsetting. You see the pattern? You can’t cure people with mental illnesses by telling them they’re being irrational or hurting themselves. If it were that easy, they’d have cured themselves already.

Do not tell a person with ADHD or mental illness that they should not be taking medication. This is a personal decision. Furthermore, since medications have wide-ranging effects on people’s bodies and minds and often unpleasant side effects, most people taking medications have thought through the issue, done a cost-benefit analysis, and decided that the ability to function better is worth it. Their decision should be respected.

A disabled person with intellectual disability who has the academic or IQ abilities of, say, a seven year old does not actually have the mind of a seven year old. They have different life experiences, needs, stages of life, bodies, and so on.

If a disabled person is having a meltdown, they are not angry, they are terrified. They’re not throwing a tantrum or being aggressive, they have gone into fight or flight. The best thing you can do is remain calm yourself and help them calm down. It may help to keep your distance, keep your voice low and calm, let them retreat to a safe place if they know to do that, or remind them to do so if they don’t. Reasoning with them won’t work well because they’re unlikely to be able to hear and understand you. The worst thing you can do is start yelling yourself, threatening them, be violent to them, cut off their escape route, or get right up in their personal space.

Other ideas? Please reblog and add more. The more the merrier.

I’d add to this one:

Do not tell a person with ADHD or mental illness that they should not be taking medication. This is a personal decision. Furthermore, since medications have wide-ranging effects on people’s bodies and minds and often unpleasant side effects, most people taking medications have thought through the issue, done a cost-benefit analysis, and decided that the ability to function better is worth it. Their decision should be respected.

That’s what you have, but I’d make it more generic. I wouldn’t say “Don’t tell someone that they should not be taking medication.” I would say “Don’t tell someone whether or not they should be taking medication.” Because most people not taking medications have also thought through the issue, done a cost-benefit analysis, and decided that the bad effects of taking the medication outweigh the good ones. Or we have already tried taking medications, possibly tried taking more than 10 or 20 different varieties of medications at all different doses, and found that not only did they harm us, they didn't help us, or didn’t help us enough to be worth the harm.

TW for psychiatric abuse:

I don’t like lists of this nature where the decision to take medication is always the one represented as the better one. Because I’ve been a psych patient who does take meds, and one who doesn’t take meds. And while you get shit from people either way, the shit I have gotten for not taking meds has always been far more dangerous than the shit I’ve gotten for taking meds. And nobody ever acknowledges that. They talk about the “stigma” of taking medications, but they don’t talk about refusing meds, being tied down, and having meds shot in your ass that then had life-threatening side-effects, that you literally weren’t allowed any reprieve from until you agreed to take a less dangerous (but still invasive and mostly useless to you) med. Or the time a doctor told my parents to threaten to throw me out on the street if I didn’t take my meds. Or the near a year I spent on more and more meds that actually were at twice the toxic level, giving me entirely new and nasty kinds of seizures, while nobody checked the med levels and everyone blamed me and gave me more and more meds the more symptoms the meds gave me because supposedly all those symptoms were ‘anxiety’ and would go away if I took more meds. Or the many other violent and dangerous ways I was coerced into taking medications that did really bad things to my body and gave no actual benefit.

I actually do take psychiatric meds at this point, although nothing heavy-duty. And I do understand that there are people out there who are really nasty to people who are on meds, and try to persuade you not to take them. I still remember when I was on neuroleptics and had a friend who would dramatically look away from me every time I opened my med box, to show his disdain for the whole thing. And things like that. But none of the 'stigma’ I’ve ever experienced for being a med-compliant psych patient has ever come even close to the level of utter horrors that I’ve experienced for being “noncompliant” with meds. At which point it seemed like anything goes as long as it would force me to get meds into my system.

And I don’t see a lot of people acknowledging that side of the coin. I see a lot of people willing to acknowledge there’s a stigma to taking meds, but I don’t see a lot of people willing to acknowledge the price paid by people who don’t want to take meds. Worse, a lot of the people who are so keen on ending the stigma of taking meds, are also quite keen on making it sound like people who are unwilling to take meds are doing something wrong, and that the things that are done to us to force or coerce us into taking them are for our own good. Or that if we don’t want meds, we must not want to get better. Or that it means we aren’t taking care of ourselves. I’ve heard it all.

I have always been pro-choice when it comes to meds of any kind, even illegal drugs. (Not that I think illegal drugs are usually good for people, but that I don’t think it does anyone any good to criminalize them or make people feel like shit for taking them. And sometimes they are actually good for people, see medical marijuana for instance. But that’s a whole different topic.) So I think people can put into their body whatever they want to, and shouldn’t get crapped on for doing that. But I also think people should have a choice not to take medication. (And that if they want to be forced to take medication in any circumstance, they should draw up a psychiatric living will that states the circumstances where this is and isn’t okay with them. These things exist.)

And that’s where many of the people who are so big on ending the stigma of medication end up disagreeing with me. Because many of them tell me straight out that people who won’t take medication are delusional, or are not to be trusted, or are not interested in taking care of themselves, or all these other things. Some of them have no problem with forced drugging and have told me so. (A lot of this ended my ability to attend events at local mental health clubhouse type places run by “consumers”, because it turned out that they were willing to have people involuntarily committed from their premises, and that they believed in forced drugging under those circumstances, and all sorts of other horrible stuff. So this wasn’t just a thing on the Internet, this was “oh shit there goes the one place I could meet people who understood what I was going through”. They treated us “non-compliant patients” as if we were “low functioning”.)

Anyway… I have to go burp my g-tube so I need to end this now, this may be over-explaining my case but I wanted to explain why I think that statements like that one should be neutral, as in it should go both ways, people have a right to make a decision about meds, whatever that decision is, and have it respected.