alarajrogers:

the-real-seebs:

autiemice:

I see a conversation happen often. It goes like this: 

• Person A: “People would never tell someone to just stop using their crutches, so why do they think it’s okay to tell me to just stop taking my psychiatric medication? It’s so annoying!”
• Person B: “What?! Of course people tell that to people who use crutches. They do it all the time! Basically, if you’re not an amputee (and sometimes even then) and you use a mobility aid, tons of people will tell you to just not. Don’t throw physically disabled people under the bus!” 

And, that’s the end of productive discussion. It either continues with Person B educating (or berating, depending on temperament) Person A for being uninformed on physical disability or just drops there. And the original point is lost. 

In order to prevent this, because discussing the specifics of saneism is an important thing to do, there are things that both Person A and Person B could say instead. 

• A better version for Person A is “The very same people who would never tell a person to stop using their crutches will tell me to stop taking my psychiatric medication! I wonder why that is? It’s so annoying!” 

And this is probably closer to what they mean anyway. Person A may or may not know anything about the experience of a person with a disability that they don’t have, but, odds are, if they’re talking about ableism, they probably just phrased it a bit clumsily because they do know there are people who are unspeakably cruel to people with disabilities, they were trying to say that people who they didn’t expect to be cruel about disabilities are cruel to them. 

We can see this in other examples too. Like “People are okay with binary trans people, but they still tell me nonbinary gender isn’t real.” It’s true that plenty of people aren’t okay with binary trans people, but that isn’t what we’re talking about right now. We’re talking about the people who are okay with binary trans people, but don’t believe in nonbinary genders. Those exist and it’s useful to talk about. 

In much the same way, there are plenty of people who are kind about physical disability, who don’t believe in mental illness or think that psychiatric medication is harmful. And talking about that group is helpful too. 

• A better version for Person B is “Well, plenty of people do tell people with crutches that, let’s not forget that, but yeah, it is weird that even people with no problem respecting physical disability, are still really ableist about mental illness. Let’s talk about that.”

This provides the same reframe and context while not losing the point of the conversation.

It’s a common problem that “Wait! You said a problematic thing!” is a conversation stopper instead of just an aside to the main point, even when the main point is genuinely very important. And being understanding about slightly clumsy phrasing would be a much better way to approach these conversations. It also makes them more accessible to entry level participants and anyone with communication disabilities. 

Good advice. It’s easy to derail things by focusing on something technically true but not actually that relevant to the point.

I always find it weird that people even use the example “nobody says you shouldn’t use crutches”, because in fact, crutches are the go-to example of a disability aid that everyone thinks you should not use. The term “crutch”, when used metaphorically, means “a thing that you rely on too much that maybe you needed once but now it’s making you weaker and you need to get rid of it.” 

There’s a reason for that – most people who use crutches are normally able-bodied people who are currently injured, with a twisted ankle or a broken leg, and for those people, continuing to use the crutch after they’ve healed will, in fact, weaken them. And humans are bad at understanding the difference between acute and chronic illness/disability, and very good at giving unsolicited, unwanted and useless advice that doesn’t apply, so we quite often tell people on crutches they shouldn’t be on crutches whether or not their condition will actually ever heal or not.

A better example would be glasses. I don’t know of anyone who says that people with nearsightedness shouldn’t wear vision aids. Literal glasses, yes, we’ll tell people they should wear contacts instead, but only the fringiest fringe-ideology-believers would ever tell a person with nearsightedness that wearing visual aids is unnecessary or will make their vision worse. And this is because wearing glasses/contacts is completely normalized. So many people have a condition that requires these that it’s not even perceived as a disability, even though it really is. (I’ve gone farsighted and can’t read tiny print anymore without glasses, but glasses for farsight make me sick when I look at anything but the tiny print, and they don’t make bifocals for people who are not nearsighted as well as farsighted. And I’m not nearly as bad off as people who, say, have 20/100 in the far field and have broken their glasses.)

In my experience, people are okay with disabilities under two circumstances:

– So many people have the disability that it’s widely understood to be a human condition thing. The inability of most adults to hear the extreme high pitches that most children and teens can hear is not considered a disability at all; in fact, I strongly suspect the ability to hear this range causes more problems than the inability, because adults demand of children that their reality is to be acknowledged over the child’s reality, so a child who is really irritated by a high pitched electronic whining that the parent can’t hear might be told the noise doesn’t even exist. The inability to digest milk products is a disability in Europe and the United States, where most of the people are white and carry the genes for extended lactase production, but not in China, where most of the people are Asian and can’t make lactase past the age of 5 or so. Height is associated with higher death rates the taller you are, but because human men are taller than human women on average, no one perceives height as a potentially life-shortening disability and tries to block their son’s production of HGH in his childhood unless he shows signs of giantism.

– The disability is acute, not chronic. If you try to kill yourself, most people are ok with the idea that you go to the hospital, you get some medication, you get stabilized. But then you’re released and you’re all better, right? Right? A special diet because you have a bad cold is normal, but a special diet because you have chronic food allergies makes you a special snowflake, aren’t you? It’s okay to have a hard time paying attention in class because there’s a parade going on outside, but if the parade is in your head, all the time, well then you’re just lazy and stupid, right? 

And yes, people will have higher tolerance for physical disability than mental disability, and higher tolerance for mental disability that’s treatable than mental disability that’s not. I live in a house full of disabled people, among them a legally blind man who beats the drum of “get treated for your depression/bipolar disorder/schizophrenia” harder than anyone but can’t comprehend that you have to approach an autistic child (or adult!) differently in some respects and there are things you can’t expect them to do without help. 

It seems to me that the places we need to work hardest are the areas of “it makes you different from most other people so I don’t want to have to deal with it” and “it is not treatable in a way that you will ever be able to be like most other people”. We’re fine with accommodating a disability that literally everyone has. (Frankly, if introverts ran the world, the need to go to the movies or restaurants with other people would probably be interpreted as a crippling disability, and we’d dismiss extroverts’ loneliness with lists of singular activities they could undertake that would make us feel better but won’t help them. But because extroverts run things, our ability to enjoy ourselves by ourselves without having to rely on others is ignored as an ability, and our inability to spend every waking moment with other people is treated as a disability.) And we’re fine with accommodating a short-term disability that you’re going to get over (sometimes – ageism plays badly into this, so that the short-term disability of being shorter than all the adults, a disability literally everyone has for a while before most of us grow out of it, isn’t actually accommodated well at all.) It’s where we’re different from other people and we’re going to be that way our whole lives that people most fall down on being able to comprehend what it’s like to be us, or to be able or willing to help us.