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BADD - How disability hierarchy hurts transabled people
Written by Sean on Thursday, May 1, 2008
Blogging Against Disablism Day (BADD) is happening for the third year. And for the third year, I am participating. The first year was a bit bumpy, the second year wasn’t so. You can read past the past entries if you are interested :) This year, I wish to speak about the hierarchy found in the disability community, as it is a topic that has been toyed with on this blog recently.
What do I mean by "hierarchy"? Simple, there seems to be a belief that some types of disabilities are better than others. Quads are better than paras, paras are better than amputees, etc. It seems at times that only certain disabilities are "acceptable". Wheelchair users are at the top (and that fact is pretty obvious with the International Symbol of Access (ISA), a stylised wheelchair user. An advocate discusses this at length on a different site. Then there are folks with vision impairments, who have set themselves in a class apart, and who, in the United States anyway, have managed to get consistantly higher disability benefits through advocacy. My hat is off to them, whatever they can get is good. But it does not help with presenting a united front with people who have other disabilities.
And then, there are those with cognitive impairments. Often relegated at the bottom of the totem pole. Too many people in the Independent Living (IL) movement aren’t able (or willing?) to cater to that group’s needs (although to be fair, I hear the situation is improving).
And lower down still, are people who have mental illnesses.
It is as if folks with mental illnesses are non-entities. They aren’t worthy of the respect of the disability community. In fact, the disability community as a whole behaves towards people with mental illnesses somewhat like society at large behaves towards the disability community. Yes, that’s right, I am saying that the disability community is showing ableist behaviours towards people with mental illnesses.
I remember the multiple times when people in the IL community made crass remarks such as "chill, take a pill", or "he must be off his meds today", or "what a lunatic". Why are these statements any more acceptable than to say "he’s a retard", "what a spazz", or "she’s so lame"??? Mind you, I’m not into political correctness for the sake of PC. But such language is symptomatic of a deeper problem.
By now, one might wonder where I’m going with this and how it relates to Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID). Simple, BIID is a mental illness. Not everyone agrees with that in the BIID community, yet, it is my firm belief. I’ve ranted about the disability community excluding us in the past, many times over, but it was more from a point of view of "disability community vs BIID community". That is, while we perceive ourselves as people with disabilities, generally speaking, my interactions have shown that the disability community isn’t ready to step up to bat and accept us in their midst.
But this is slowly changing. Or rather, some elements within the disability have started to tell me that they accept the argument of BIID as a mental illness, hence “a disability of another nature“. This is good, a step in the right direction. But then, as discussed above, the hierarchy means that our "inclusion" in the disability community has us slotted at the bottom of the pole.
And from there, difficult issues arise. Is someone with a mental illness unworthy of the only functional "mitigating measure" available to them? Is a mental/emotional need less worthy than a physical one? Is my need for a wheelchair less valid than that of someone with a physical impairment?
It is easy to say "Sean doesn’t *really* need to use a wheelchair". But be cautious, because it is a slippery slope you’d be embarking on. If you say that, the inevitable logical extrapolation is that someone who has a mental illness isn’t really worthy of therapy/medication/other mitigating measure. Which, if you believe in the disability hierarchy, might not bother you, but it bothers me, and not just because I am directly affected by it.
Tags: BADD - Impairment Specific, BIID, Disability, Mental Illness, Transabled, Wheelchair
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7 Comments
2 On 1 May, 2008, May said:
(we seem to be becoming a fairly active commentator)
Just thinking about this more, and how this is affecting us fairly directly.
We’ve been on disability since the end of July. Haven’t been to work for 9 months, now. We are definitely encountering the attitude of ‘it’s not real, since it’s just a mental condition.’ How do you support the claim that it’s real, and that it really is incapacitating us, especially when in other areas of our life, we look very normal? We received a letter from our disability insurance just the other day, stating that they’ve decided we’re not really disabled, so are not going to authorize any further claims.
We’d already decided that we’re doing somewhat better, and are ready to try returning to work. We were scheduled to go back on the first of May, but HR contacted us yesterday, asking us not to come in until they let us know. Said they need to figure out if they can make use of us still, with the modifications and ramp up our doctor has suggested. We’re scared this means ‘we don’t think your disability is real enough to put the effort into working with it.’ It’s been 9 months, so nothing guarantees that we will have a job to return to, so … we could find ourselves without a job, for the first time in over a decade.
We have to wonder, if we were using a chair instead, if the response would be the same. There was very much the feeling from the conversation that it was specifically because this is a mental issue that they weren’t sure they wanted/could work with it.
3 On 3 May, 2008, jocelyn said:
Interesting points - I thought you might be going down this road, given our recent exchange. I wonder though, in response to both Sean and May’s input here, how many people I know who have a mental illness (everything from manic depression to unipolar depression to anxiety and schizophrenia) would self-identify as “disabled?” Many would not consider themselves as having a disability any more than a disabled person would call themselves “sick.”
On another point - I also wonder how many of these issues around hierarchy are culturally bound. In Canada, disability benefits aren’t impossible to get. I do believe that it would be available to a person with BIID - though someone could correct me on that. I haven’t perceived the same sort of turf warring here as I’ve seen in the blogs and forums I see from the states at least. Our system is public, largely, and everyone at least gets basic care and support - many get much more. This then, suggests that the “disability hierarchy” that you suggest is less a real thing than a symptom of class and social hierarchies that are closely related to the social policy of your own government.
I think, overall, people are threatened by what they cannot control or quantify. PEople with mental illnesses have always borne the brunt of this fear because in the end, their illnesses can be verified or quantified only by a few trained people. It is very similar among people with chronic pain, of which I am one, because pain too is invisible. People with visible disabilities enjoy a certain recognition because of the objective nature of their conditions, however this also carries a sort of public nature that is impossible to shake.
bottom line: the grass aint always greener on the other side.
4 On 4 May, 2008, ettina said:
“People with mental illnesses have always borne the brunt of this fear because in the end, their illnesses can be verified or quantified only by a few trained people.”
Not really. That’s a big problem.
One of my father’s co-workers was saying Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is just an excuse, and my father convinced him it wasn’t by showing him pictures of brain scans of normal and FAS brains. But with most psychiatric diagnoses, brain scan results are at most only subtly different. Often times the big difference is in chemistry, or on the cellular level. FMRI shows more differences, but even then, it’s not diagnostic. It’s so subjective.
5 On 4 May, 2008, Sean said:
@ Jocelyn:
I thought you might be going down this road, given our recent exchange
I’ve been “accused” of being predictable ;) Talking of our recent exchange, you never said what you thought of the responses I made to your “tricky” questions :) I *am* interested.
how many people I know who have a mental illness would self-identify as “disabled?” Many would not consider themselves as having a disability any more than a disabled person would call themselves “sick.”
Hmm, but they can’t have it “both ways”. They can’t seek protection from discrimination on the basis of their disability/mental illness, and claim they don’t belong to that group. And this is something that happens a lot. It’s similar for some people in th deaf community. They say they are not disabled, which is fair enough. But then, they go and ruin it because they insist on getting interpreters provided, etc. I have no problem with the provision of interpreters as a reasonable accommodation, but it strikes me as strange that they identify as having a disability only when it’s convenient!
Perhaps, Jocelyn, your comment is more a reflection of the difference between impairment and disability. A mental illness (or a psychiatric condition) is an impairment, just like spina bifida is an impairment. The disability is caused by all the barriers encountered.
I also wonder how many of these issues around hierarchy are culturally bound.
Well, I’ve seen this happening in North America (US and Canada), in Oceania (Australia and New Zealand), in Europe (UK and Ireland), and in Central America (Mexico). Granted the sampling is mostly anglo-saxon heritage, but social services, etc vary significantly from full support from government to less availability of services. Cultural bias always plays a part, but I’m not sure it plays such a big part in this case.
I do believe that it would be available to a person with BIID
No, benefits would not be available to someone with BIID, because of the BIID, as there is no “official” diagnosis. It’s not (yet) in the DSM, so nobody can really diagnose it. It might be possible to get someone on benefit because of the depression related to BIID, but not because of the BIID itself.
6 On 26 May, 2008, Godammit, I’m Mad! » Blog Archive » Transabled: A Whole New World! said:
[...] over at this blog, there is a discussion about the disabled community’s ‘ableism’ in refusing to [...]
I hate to say it but even within mental ill-health communities there is a hierarchy of discrimination. Professionals and sufferers alike give higher status to the psychotic disorders over mood disorders, higher status to bi-polar disorder over depression and everything gets higher status than the newish and much loathed loathed problems lumped together as ‘personality disorder’, which to most lay people only means one thing - dangerous psychopaths. You can guess which box will be ticked by BIID if it gets into the new DSM.
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1 On 1 May, 2008, May said:
People can see that someone with a physical disability has a real, definite issue that they have to deal with. They understand that the disabled persion can’t just ‘get over it.’ A wheelchair user can’t just decide to get up and walk, and we understand this. The person with a physical disability may be looked upon as less than able people by many, but are still accepted as having a real disability.
At the same time, people look upon those of us with mental disabilities as not really having a disability. They can’t see it. It’s not something they’re able to picture, to quantify. Therefor, it’s not a real disability. We look just like they do, and can function fairly normally without obvious assistance devices. Therefore, it must just be in our head, and we could just get over it, choose to be normal.
They’re right, in that as a mental disability, it is ‘just in our head’, but that doesn’t make it any less real, and doesn’t mean we can choose to ‘just get over it.’
We wish we could. Life would be so much easier. Or, at least, it looks that way to us. It probably would be swapping one set of issues for another.
It doesn’t work that way, but people for the most part do not believe in what they cannot see.
…
On a different tangent, one of the local stores has the usual check stand with the usual disability symbol of the stylized which chair on blue background. They have a second check stand with a stylized white person with long cane on a blue background. We think that’s neat, and not surprising as we have a school for the blind just a block away from us, but at only 6″ square, we wonder just how helpful that is for someone who uses a long cane.