Meowsers last blog post..My Seat, Your Seat, His Seat, Their Seat

I hate the artificial divide between “physical” and “mental.” As I’ve been explaining on a shakesville thread today, fibromyalgia is actually intimately interconnected with depression. The mechanisms it works by inevitably mean there will be mood symptoms as well as physical symptoms, and that they will be vague and impossible to separate. And really, why do we have to separate them?

My brain is part of my body. It is a physical thing. My consciousness is not wholly separate from my flesh. My brain operates in ways that affect both my consciousness and my flesh in ways that cannot be cleanly divided.

Which is why I don’t like the centering of physicality in mainstream disability discussions, and the implicit rejection of legitimacy of non-physical conditions — including mental health issues, but also recognizing that there are conditions that affect a person in ways that can’t be categorized so simply.

Abby, I do get you on not liking the “ability” framing. I mean: I have the same conditions now, able to work F/T, as I did five years ago, when I was homebound with pain and couldn’t manage to sit upright for too long at a time, or three years ago, when I was also homebound with severe anxiety and having panic attacks that damn near drove me to suicide. My abilities have changed, shifted, in various ways, both positive and negative, throughout all that time. But I still have those conditions! It’s why I do tend to say “I have a disability” rather than “I am disabled.”

But I do also try to own the concept of disability vs. illness. I do embrace “disability” because I don’t want to feel that I’m rejecting it due to the negativity heaped on it by the (fully abled, normative, typical, etc). I don’t want to feel like I’m rejecting disability because I don’t want to be associated with those peopl, you know? And there is a vibrant community of pwd and disability activists, and that’s the term the community moves forward with. So that hugely affects my decision to identify as disabled (or having a disability). I want to own the word, the idea, and all that it comes with. That was I can unpack all that baggage as best I can…

Please, folks, keep thinking out loud here! The more ideas, the better.

i’ve become fond on the terms “neurotypical” and “neuroatypical” to describe people without and with craziness. that frames the non-disabled as the “typical” or common rather than the “fully abled” and doesn’t frame the “neuroatypical” as lesser than or lacking. “atypical” is not wholly unpejorative, i realize, but i think infinitely less so than “not fully abled” or “lacking ability.”

commenters above have suggested “physically typical” or “standard-bodied,” which have similar frameworks for discussing physical disability. the problem i see with these terms is finding terms that encompass both physical and mental disabilities. i think having separate terms for physical and mental disabilities reinforces the chasm between physical health and mental health and encourages stigmatizing or diminishing mental health issues.

i also really like the terms that emphasize the potential for someone to move from typical to atypical, either in terms of physical or mental health. those reminders that someone could slide across the line fairly easily also diminish the negative aspects of labels for people with disabilities.

i can say that i wholeheartedly reject “disabled” and “not-disabled,” no matter how simple the terms are. that i was thrilled to hear obama mention disability issues means that there’s a really low bar for federal engagement on these issues, not that we should stick with those terms.

abby jeans last blog post..irreverentandirrelevant:
Not once.

Meowsers last blog post..What Our Ears Have Been Missing

I’ll cross post and link to your blog.

hagar’s daughters last blog post..Old School Friday: The Choice Is Mine

I’ll have to think about this for a while; it will certainly be a welcome respite from all the crap that’s been going down on various blogs as of late.