cross-posted from: https://discuss.divergentparenting.space/post/29407
Take a moment and imagine that someone calls you disabled. Ask yourself, do you agree or disagree? What feelings come up for you? Based on your lived experiences, like your interactions with family, teachers, doctors, friends, and society more generally, how has your relationship with the concept of disability been shaped?\n > \n > Even though many governmental organizations officially recognize autism as a disability, this doesn’t mean that all autistic individuals identify as being disabled. Members of the autistic community have such varied lived experiences, which contributes to whether we each identify as being disabled or not. Moreover, how we relate to the concept of disability differs as well.
This really resonates with me. For decades I thought my problem depression, more recently I thought it was an anxiety disorder. Mental illnesses that need fixing and are therefore my fault for struggling with.
Then last month an autism professional suggested that the anxiety could be due to masking, not doing anything to manage sensory sensitivities, and having “neurotypical” expectations of myself. I then had a long holiday where I barely felt anxious at all, but it all came back the second I got home, and oh, maybe I’m not actually mentally ill…
I feel like what’s wrong is that we think that even mental illnesses need fixing. There are some mental illnesses which can be fixed. They are temporary state in the same way that a cold is a temporary state. However, some mental illnesses are just how you are. You can take steps to mitigate it like the way that someone who can walk uses a wheelchair, but fundamentally it’s all just life-aids, not a fix. If you have clinical depression, those pills are just life aids, they are not fixing anything. It’s completely unlike when I fell into a depressive episode once. The pills fixed me because for me it was a temporary state. after a month I could just walk away. I think that’s a difference that needs to be understood. A person who broke their legs using a wheelchair is completely different than an amputee using a wheelchair. One uses the wheel chair as a temporary aid until they are “fixed” and one has an eternal state that will always need the aid.
I think it’s unfortunate that people feel shame about needing life-aids permanently or temporarily. I was born physically disabled and I lean on any crutch I can. I really think this is why I’ve been able to effortlessly support my child and she doesn’t feel any kind of way about her condition with autism. I’m always saddened by parents who refuse to give their kid life-aids because they want them to be “normal”. Even before I knew my kid had ASD I offered her anything that would aid her because who cares really. I want her to be happy and successful and if you complete the race in a wheelchair, you still completed the race which is more than some people can do even able and with a wheelchair.
I guess that’s where I draw a line between “illness” and “disability”, at least mentally (i.e. mental illness can get better, mental disability can’t). I know some conditions have a very blurred boundary between “curable” and “incurable”, depression being a notable example, but my gut feeling is that disabilities are permanent while illnesses either get better or worse (without treatment, I mean, for those that are kept in stasis by treatment).
I’ve not given this a huge amount of thought, though, so that game of semantics is probably full of holes.