I’m just curious about this. As someone with a chronic illness, I pretty much never hear anyone talk about things related to the sorts of difficulties and discrimination I and others might face within society. I’m not aware of companies or governments doing anything special to bring awareness on the same scale of say, pride month for instance. In fact certain aspects of accessibility were only normalized during the pandemic when healthy people needed them and now they’re being gradually rescinded now that they don’t. It’s annoying for those who’ve come to prefer those accommodations. It’s cruel for those who rely on them.
And just to be clear, I’m not suggesting this is an either or sort of thing. I’m just wondering why it’s not a that and this sort of thing. It’s possible I’m not considering the whole picture here, and I don’t mean for this to be controversial.
A lot of the points here are valid but I personally think it’s partly because disabled people aren’t “pretty”. There’s a narrow band of what’s sort of socially accepted as a disability and if you’re not in that band you’re kinda screwed. If it’s not visible enough you’re faking or overexaggerating or a hypochondriac. If it’s too visible it’s gross and annoying and ‘why are you even out if you need everyone to cater to you?’. And when it comes to issues and accepting them, I feel like most people mainly care about the “normal” people who just happen to be apart of that group. Your Ellen DeGenereses and captain Holts and whatnot. Think about it - whenever you usually see disabilities in media, it’s usually the same set of easily identifiable ones and a lot of the time the character in question has something that negates it in a way and if it is something more nonstandard, it seems like it’s the butt of the joke a lot of the time. And that doesn’t really work for disabilities because of how varied they are and how they often need conflicting things. You can’t just fight for the nice socially acceptable ones and call it a day.
Same goes for mental illness - it feels like most people are still working from the same set of sterotypes where you’re either a deranged maniac or an inaccurate sterotype like a savant with no social skills or maybe a hyper idealised version of said condition. And it’s hard to fight for accommodation when people don’t even understand what you’re fighting for.