Physical vs. Mental Disabilities and hypocrisy

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I agree with this.

Also, physical disabilities have clear and obvious boundaries. It's also pretty easy to figure out what the accomodations need to be and they won't have to vary much from one person to the next. If the person is blind, communicate verbally. If the person is deaf, communicate visually. If the person uses a wheelchair, provide access with elevators or ramps and have door opening buttons that are reachable when seated. It's all pretty boilerplate. But with mental disabilities, the nature of the disability varies wildly from person to person and the accomodations needed are obscure, easy to screw up, and non-transferable from one person to the next.

There's that saying, "when you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism". And that makes accomodations particularly difficult and need to be spelled out for each individual. Nobody ever says "when you've met one person in a wheelchair, you've met one person in a wheelchair". Although every person in a wheelchair is obviously an individual, the accomodations needed aren't individual at all. The ramp will work for all wheelchair users. But for people with mental disabilities, the accomodations that work for one might actually make things worse for another. And you can't tell by looking at somebody what sort of accomodation they will need. And even if they tell you, the accomodation can be complicated and difficult to follow. For an example, take the accomodation that people complain about on here a lot: "I need things spelled out. Don't leave out steps." Such a seemingly simple accomodation but it's actually very easy to screw up because each person's idea of steps that need to be spelled out is different. In comparison, remembering to use no hand gesture communication when talking to a blind person is rather easy.

These are all interesting points.... I'm glad this discussion is here. I think I have a somewhat unique perspective because I have both physical and mental disabilities, so I will add my thoughts… I apologize for being long-winded, but I want to be sure to explain clearly because this is a topic I care a lot about.

Physically speaking, I have autoimmune problems, neurological conditions, and severe fibromyalgia, all of which contribute to limiting my mobility. These problems aren’t visible in that I do not (yet) use a wheelchair or other assistive device, largely because of my own stubbornness, but I do move very slowly with a marked shuffle, and I struggle with things like stairs. I have a hard time dealing with doctors a lot of the time – I am only 21, which is extraordinarily young for the majority of my health problems, and as a result, I have found that at least 70% of the doctors I have seen don’t believe what I tell them about my symptoms, even though tests prove that I am not lying. (Example: even though repeated MRIs have shown I have multiple brain lesions in areas of the brain that would explain my constant headache and lack of muscle coordination, many doctors still do not believe the symptoms are genuine.) Also, because my conditions can flare up unexpectedly, I am often forced to cancel previously made plans because I am physically unable to follow through on them, not because I don’t want to keep the arrangements. I have lost count of how many friends I have lost due to them not wanting to or not being able to understand that fact.

Mentally, I have Asperger’s… Not much need to explain that, since you all are familiar with the condition. What I will say is that it seems to limit my ability to make friends. People get uncomfortable from my social awkwardness, or they think me stupid because I repeat things I say sometimes (even though that only happens because I get distracted from what I’m saying when I’m trying to ‘dumb down’ what I want to say so ‘normal’ people can easily understand it), or they seek me out only to use me and my near-photographic memory to their own ends before discarding the relationship, or they simply don’t have the patience or desire to tolerate my ‘quirks.’

Basically, my point is this – both physical and mental disabilities create unique problems socially. For me, with ‘invisible’ physical and mental problems, the mental disabilities inhibit my ability to make friends, while the physical disabilities impact my ability to keep friends. I recognize that this may not be true for everyone, and I agree that there is, generally speaking, a greater stigma towards mental illness than physical illness, but I would like to add that ‘invisible’ physical illness gets plenty of bad attention, too. Neither is better or worse to have or deal with; they’re just different.

The invisible deficiency, though, is a harder sell in the community. It's hard, too, to know what I'm selling - nearly sixty, multiple physical and mental deficiencies, a lifetime of frustration? Am I doomed to be an object case for what happens when autism is ignored?

Oh my god - this is exactly what I've always felt, except I could never explain it as good as you have!
Yes - this is really annoying. When my brother had a hernia and had to go up the doctors then get it treated at the hospital, nobody criticised him or anything. But when I suffered depression a couple of years ago when I was bullied, (and nearly had a breakdown), some people were like, ''oh don't be silly - grow up and get a life!'' And that made me feel worse. The only people who understood me was my mum and some others who had depressive thoughts aswell.
Some people (especially those who are socially confident and are lucky throughout life) don't seem to realise that having an ASD is equally as disabling as someone with a physical disability. You can't help the way your brain is structured, just like you can't help the way your body is structured if you're physically disabled.

The biggest form of hypocrisy I ever had to deal with was normal NT people who would brag about how weird or crazy or different they are as if it was so cool yet they completely berate and ridicule people like me who actually have severe mental problems and other conditions. I guess the imaginative fictional portrayal of living with depression, Asperger's, etc is more appealing to people than being confronted with the actual reality.

Depression is the worst as most people think they know what you are going through when they really don't. So many people claim to have been "depressed" at some previous point in their life and then "gotten over it".

when someone is physically disabled such as missing limbs/wheel-chair, etc, we see the disability and only the disability. We don't see the consequences of the disability.

I have severe indoor allergies, and everyone would say, take some anti-histamines. Well, anti-histamines don't work for everyone, not for all allergies, and most anti-histamines will only work for a couple weeks before the body gets used to it. the thing with indoor allergies, is humans sleep indoors. Unlike pollen/outside allergies, which anti-histamines are only needed seasonally and short term, indoor allergies require treatment 365 days per year, if I intend to sleep every night. I have not had a single good night's sleep in over 20 years. I feel miserable at night from the allergies, and then I feel miserable during the day, due to the lack of sleep. Needless to say, it's a drain on my cognitive abilities to go days without sleep. The consequences of even the smallest disabilities can be severe if there is no way around it.

I think the bigger issue is more one of association. A physical disability is associated with the physical limits of the body, but a mental/psychological/neurological disability is associated with what-ever-nonsense ignorant people can come up with.

Most criminals are just plain people who choose to live a life of crime, but people of abnormal cognitive abilities, are always seen in the public's eye, as having an hidden agenda. people who complain of chronic fatigue are accused of trying to cover up laziness. people with anxieties and phobias, are accused of being too week, people with depression, are accused of victimization.

It puzzles me, but people simple can not fully grasp the fact that most crimes are committed by family, friends, and acquaintances, not a perfect stranger, and rarely a perfect stranger suffering from a neurological disorder who is barely surviving.

Coming from my perspective, why don't we try to look at from nonautistic/aspie point of view. They(the majority of the general public)were not born with or did not develop any serious mental disabilities and are either scared by what they see or simply don't choose to understand because of what they might percieve as the mentally disabled person's lying. To them it is not "normal" to have a limited amount of interests or not be able to pick up on subtle things like body language! More later...

Yeah I ha I've sort of noticed that, it is a bit annoying....as I always say if someone was born without a leg or an arm would someone tell them to just grow it back? probably not. So if someone is born with something like aspergers syndrome why do people expect you to just get over it and be normal...its not exactly possible.

Did anyone get my last comment? If not here's a slim recap of Sweetleaf's post and my reply "Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2011 11:55 am Post subject:

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Yeah I ha I've sort of noticed that, it is a bit annoying....as I always say if someone was born without a leg or an arm would someone tell them to just grow it back? probably not. So if someone is born with something like aspergers syndrome why do people expect you to just get over it and be normal...its not exactly possible " 1. I understand that,and even though I've improved from my teen years to today(I'm around 24), I'm still learning to cope
2. There are people like most of my friends who either try to understand us or simply appreciate who we are
3. They should be congratulated and need all the help that we and people like us can give them(i.e., resources like this website and Autism Speaks(TM))!

Also, my friend is NT but has a very severe heart condition, which does hold her back from doing certain things like driving (because she has sort mild heart attacks, or something similar, very frequently), working full time (because she is very small and weak and needs more sleep than the average young adult), drinking alcohol (because she's on lots of medication), and other various opportunities what even I can do without a problem. I mean, my ASD doesn't stop me from driving, working and drinking. Obviously I don't drink alcohol because I don't like it, and also I'm prone to headaches more, but that's still got nothing to do with my ASD. I physically can work, and although my friend can, she gets ill a lot and so has so take time off work. Also she's weak, so she can't do much lifting or anything like that. And she is very small - probably as the same body size as a 10-year-old (I don't just mean height).

But she's still getting more help from social services than I ever will. Although I am physically able, I still struggle an awful lot, so although she's NT-minded and I'm just as able-bodied as the average NT, our disabilities may be different but they are still equally as disabling. I suffer from high anxiety, which holds me back a lot, plus I have social difficulties which also hold you back from finding work, especially when you've practically got to do it on your own. I find it hard with making telephone calls, filling out applications, attending interviews - and I'm not expecting everyone else to do these things for me, but I still want a little more help, like my friend got. Now she's in a job and there's no stereotype with her disability, plus she's allowed to have sick pay when she has a lot of time off - all because she's got a disability. With me, I bet they take one look at my application form, see the words ''Autism spectrum disorder'' written in the disability bit, and they say, ''nope - she's useless'', and throw the application away. Yes, it is an offensive stereotype. It upsets me, but this is how life has got. And with my friend, they probably see the words ''heart problem'' or ''heart disease'', and they probably go all sympathetic.

In fact, I've heard a group of NTs talking before, and I heard one of them say, ''my neice is severely Autistic'', and one of the others rolled their eyes as if to say, ''ohh! Can't be doing with that!'' But if one of them had said, ''my neice has got a physical deformity'', they would probably think or say, ''aww, bless.''

Life is so unfair. A disability is a disability, and all people who's disability interferes with their daily life should be equally accepted by employment and other social standards.

It's also easier for people to imagine themselves as being physically handicapped. People can look and think "oh god, if I were in a car crash I could be in a wheelchair like that guy" or "If some nasty chemicals somehow got into my eye I could go blind". They don't look at someone with say, a brain injury and think "oh god, just one bad nail gun accident and I could be mistaking my wife for a hat".

The way a person thinks is what is natural to them, it's invisible and it's so natural and instinctive to them most don't even notice it enough to be able to articulate how they think. They just do it. Most people assume everyone is and acts largely like they do, or if given a chance, would. So the idea that someone could mistake their wife for a hat is absolutely absurd. It's like being afraid that a left-handed dyslexic albino serial killing clown with one blue eye and one brown eye is gonna read the address of his next victim wrong and climb through your window and kill you. Just in case someone here might actually have a real fear about that (you never know) I'll specify that both are examples of what people would call completely irrational worries. I think that's also a big part of why mental illnesses scare people so much and why depression tends to be dismissed so easily by those who've never suffered from it. This idea of a type of living death, you live, but what makes you you, how you think, is changed greatly.

In order to give something like the idea that other people can think completely differently from how you think a second thought you need to have given it a first thought. Most people haven't. But they've almost certainly thought once or twice about how much it would suck to not have both arms, or being able to walk, or being blind.

I think it's less about physical vs. not physical, and more about visible to the person vs. invisible to the person. (I add "to the person" in there because whether a condition is visible or invisible to someone depends a lot on their expectations about the world and their familiarity with the condition in question and the ways that it shows. Many people who aren't familiar with a condition will simply substitute character traits/flaws for the condition itself, calling someone lazy, spoiled, standoffish, arrogant, shy, stupid, whatever.) People with "invisible" physical impairments get about the same level of crap people with "invisible" cognitive impairments get.

I'm in a weird situation because my autism gets less visible the moment I'm in a wheelchair. Because people assume that the stimming, "blank" face, trouble with response time, etc. is somehow a symptom of a physical impairment that puts me in the chair. If I'm the exact same way out of a chair it's not unusual for people to describe me as "profoundly autistic" or "profoundly ret*d" or whatever, so it's a massive change in how I'm treated. But the crap I get when being autistic shows too much is usually not that I'm lazy or something, they just assume I'm incompetent in a huge number of ways and don't see my areas of competence at all. Once when I was hospitalized after beginning to go septic a medical guy there described me as having "the cognitive functioning of an infant". When I'm seen as physically disabled people instead overestimate my cognitive abilities. It's weird.

I guess I'd rather be overestimated than underestimated, but being overestimated comes with its own set of problems. Just recently on another thread people started assuming that if I can write superficially well then I can't have language problems, or that the language problems must somehow be "bizarre" just because they weren't the same kind of language problems as most people are familiar with (the continuum from totally lacking language to being quite eloquent). In reality the problems are no more bizarre than Parkinson's is a "bizarre" movement disorder just because many people with it can run up a flight of stairs but be unable to move past it at the top (so it doesn't align with the standard view that people range from immobile to uncoordinated to very well coordinated and everyone has a fixed place on that scale). It's really the same principle only with language -- I can only use the language that is triggered by something, and the language that is triggered may look really good but it's not always exactly what I meant. It's an outgrowth of a combination of the usual movement/cognitive problems associated with autism, and growing up with receptive language much worse than expressive.

So I've learned to pass -- online anyway -- but it doesn't mean that I'm not struggling or getting things wrong. When I'm not allowed any slack for this, it rapidly becomes impossible to communicate and things devolve into an argument about whether I really have these problems or if I just want an excuse to get out of disagreement. (Even though I've always been one of those people who is totally fine with disagreement and wishes more people were fine with it.) Which drives me up the wall because people with the sort of problems I have really have to depend on people taking us seriously, because without that there is no communication possible and I work myself into a frenzy trying to comply but being unable to.

Personally, I don't think people with any sort of difficulty, if I may use that word? Should be be seen as any less as having realistic adversity in his or her own life.. Many people have often questioned whether my troubles are real or imagined ...

Quite true! Thus I rest my case