i know that one of the big reasons my posts about disability on here get so many notes is because i’m viewed as more “moderate” & “reasonable” in the ableism i point out. i don’t call out every microagression. i’m not one of those “laughable” antiableists that “calls everything ableism”
that kind of… disgusts me honestly
trust me i would love to talk about how jokes about donald trump needing adult diapers must affect incontinent people who already carry more shame & self hatred because of it than you can imagine, who feel like they’ve lost all dignity, who ONLY ever see their issues talked about as a knee slapping hilarious couldn’t possibly be harmful joke. i’d love to point out that it’s no different than a hilarious joke about him needing a wheelchair & how disability jokes don’t suddenly stop being offensive when they involve poop or don’t immediately call to mind disability if you’re not disabled
i’d love to get into how the most basic & common “morally neutral” insults are antiquated & crass words for mental illness & intellectual disability
how jokes about how people who do x “are weak & won’t survive” or how “stupid people shouldn’t breed” are literally so fucking blatantly rooted in eugenics that it’s impossible to separate them
how “i clearly wasn’t thinking about disabled people when i made this joke that harms disabled people, you’re so extra” isn’t a defense, it’s a fucking indictment
but i really don’t want to open myself, an often house or even bedbound disabled person, up to a resounding chorus of “go outside” because it makes me want to fucking cry that i can’t go outside as much as a “normal person”
the fact of the matter is that the reason pointing out the ableism in “harmless comments” is seen as so silly is that ableism runs so deep in our culture that it’s completely built into the foundation of how we talk & joke. it’s in our basic language, it’s in everything. disability is so tied to inferiority that it’s hard to find any expression of inferiority that can’t be traced back to disability. ableism is so deep rooted that it’s easily seen as outright RIDICULOUS to point out every instance because you would have to think about disability constantly, with every word you choose, to never espouse ableist shit
the solution to that is not to berate the people who god help them somehow find the energy to examine & challenge all of that. it’s not to deny that the ableism is there
please consider the fact that pointing out how deep the roots of ableism go in the way we talk is such a fucking target to paint on yourself on here that even with my majority disabled follower base & thick skin from constant exposure to putrid hatemail for my radical disability activism, i’m terrified to post this & already thinking about deleting it
ive never shared this before but fuck it after making that post i feel like i have to
one of my earliest memories as a child is being in about kindergarten & thinking that it seemed kind of really wrong to call mean people “stupid” because (paraphrasing bc cmon i didnt have the words back then) a lack of conventional intelligence can’t really be helped & doesn’t make someone a bad person & it just. didn’t sit right with me. it really didnt. & immediately trying to quash that thought because all the Good People i knew used that word. everyone used that word. it was universal. so i must have been wrong
that memory has nagged at me my entire life & as i get older & more established in the disabled community i find myself wondering more & more if ignoring it is just running away from my conscience
Do not talk about an obviously disabled person in front of them as if they can’t hear or understand you.
Do not talk to a disabled person’s companion instead of them.
Ask permission before touching people, or their wheelchairs/other equipment. Even if you want to help.
Ask disabled people about their lives and really listen to their answers. (Within reason. Asking people personal questions about their sex lives, for example, is rude unless you are very close to them and they’ve communicated they’re OK with that).
Listen to what they say whether they are speaking, writing, typing, using text to speech, using a letterboard, using PECS, gesturing, using sign language, or using any other form of communication. People who cannot speak can still communicate.
Stand up for people you see getting bullied.
Understand that disabled people don’t just need friends, they can be friends, too.
Every public place does not need to have loud, blaring music and TVs with flashing screens.
If you blog, put bright, flashing images that can trigger seizures under a cut so that people with seizures can avoid looking at them.
If a job can possibly be done without a person driving, don’t require candidates to drive/have a driver’s license, and don’t interview candidates and then reject them because they don’t drive.
When talking to someone who has trouble speaking or stutters, and takes a long time to speak, wait for them to answer. Don’t keep repeating the question or pressuring them. Yes, if you’re like me and your mind is going really fast and you forget what people are saying if they take too long, it can be hard to be patient. Do it anyway.
If you are talking to a deaf person, make it easier for them to lip-read by facing towards them while looking at them, and not covering your mouth with your hands.
If you are talking to someone with hearing impairment or auditory processing disorder, it is more helpful to slow down or rephrase what you’re saying than to just speak more loudly.
Some disabled people have difficulty understanding nonliteral language such as metaphors and idioms (e.g., “a stitch in time saves nine”). If you’re talking to someone like this, try explaining what you mean by these figures of speech, or just not using them.
Recognize that failure to make eye contact does not mean someone is lying to you. It may be uncomfortable for them.
Recognize that unwillingness to go out to loud, crowded bars does not mean someone isn’t interested in socializing with you.
If people have difficulty spelling, or using the appropriate jargon/terminology for your social group, do not assume they’re stupid. You may need to paraphrase some “jargon” for them.
Recognize that a person can need time alone and it doesn’t mean they don’t like you or want to be with you. It’s just something they need so they can function at their best.
If a person does not recognize you, do not assume they don’t care about you. They may be face-blind.
If a person does not remember your birthday (or other major names, numbers, or dates) do not assume they don’t care about you. They may simply have a bad memory.
Understand that a disabled person’s talents, however esoteric, are real, not unimportant “splinter skills.”
Colorblindness affects more than just knowing what color something is. To a colorblind person, colors that they can’t see will look the same if they have the same degree of lightness/darkness. That means that to a red-green colorblind person, a red rose on a green background will blend in instead of contrast starkly, and the Chicago CTA El map will be difficult to understand. Understand that something that stands out to you and seems obvious may literally not be visible to a colorblind person.
Accept stimming.
Don’t tell them “but you look so normal.” But, if they accomplish something you know they were working really hard to do, it’s great to compliment them on it.
Understand that a person can be working incredibly hard to do something and may still not perform as well as you’d like them to, as well as the average person would, or as well as the situation demands.
If someone has a major medical problem, disability, or chronic illness, then just eating some special healthy diet or exercising more isn’t going to cure it. It might help, it might hurt, it might do nothing, but they’ve probably heard it before, and it’s none of your business in any case.
A person with OCD knows that checking or counting or whatever compulsion they perform won’t really prevent disaster from happening, it’s just a compulsion. That doesn’t stop them from feeling the need to do it anyway. A person with anxiety may know at least some of their fears are irrational or unlikely to occur. That doesn’t stop them from feeling anxious. A person with trichotillomania may know it hurts them to pull out their hair or pick at their skin, but they have trouble stopping themselves anyway. A depressed person may know they would feel better if they got out of their house and talked to people, but that doesn’t make them feel any more up to doing those things. A person who hallucinates may know the hallucinations aren’t real, but that doesn’t make them go away or feel less upsetting. You see the pattern? You can’t cure people with mental illnesses by telling them they’re being irrational or hurting themselves. If it were that easy, they’d have cured themselves already.
Do not tell a person with ADHD or mental illness that they should not be taking medication. This is a personal decision. Furthermore, since medications have wide-ranging effects on people’s bodies and minds and often unpleasant side effects, most people taking medications have thought through the issue, done a cost-benefit analysis, and decided that the ability to function better is worth it. Their decision should be respected.
A disabled person with intellectual disability who has the academic or IQ abilities of, say, a seven year old does not actually have the mind of a seven year old. They have different life experiences, needs, stages of life, bodies, and so on.
If a disabled person is having a meltdown, they are not angry, they are terrified. They’re not throwing a tantrum or being aggressive, they have gone into fight or flight. The best thing you can do is remain calm yourself and help them calm down. It may help to keep your distance, keep your voice low and calm, let them retreat to a safe place if they know to do that, or remind them to do so if they don’t. Reasoning with them won’t work well because they’re unlikely to be able to hear and understand you. The worst thing you can do is start yelling yourself, threatening them, be violent to them, cut off their escape route, or get right up in their personal space.
Other ideas? Please reblog and add more. The more the merrier.
seeing people on shows use canes incorrectly!! OMG YOU WILL HURT YOURSELF. STOP DOING THAT.
YES OMG STOP IT. This is one of my biggest pet peeves; people who know me irl probably have heard me rant about it. They make sure that the character walks funny to show that they’re really disabled or whatever, even though the WHOLE POINT OF CANES is to let you walk as normally as possible so you don’t screw up your body.
And this is actually legit damaging because no one tells you how to use a cane. Usually, you just get one, and then you use it the way you’ve seen other people use it, and if you only see people on TV with canes…you’re gonna use it wrong.
sorry to jump all over your post this just annoys me so much and your post came up first in the cripple punk tag so
If possible could you detail correct cane usage somewhere for anyone who might need it? (I understand if it’s a visual sort of instruction)
When I began using one, I looked on youtube for how-tos. It’s definitely necessary because, yeah, if people go by what they see on tv, they will likely start using it wrong and it’s really difficult to undo learning it that way.
Basically all there is to remember is that you use your cane alongside the opposite leg– not like the cane is affixed to the leg it’s closest to. If I’m holding my cane with my left arm, it’s following the right leg.
Anyone have an infographic? I do not.
here’s one i found! it’s a little confusing bc it starts at the bottom and you read upwards.
here’s two for stairs:
Here are a few!
Here is a very short video about using a cane. It’s very specific. I will say, though, that she mentions that “you’ll hear different people say different things” re: using a cane affixed to your “bad leg” but I gotta say, I’ve never heard a medical professional tell anyone to use a cane any other way than the way described in the video.
If you use a cane like Dr. House on House (for example), YOU WILL HURT YOURSELF.
I use my cane for balance, but I still use it as if I had a bad leg like described above. Sometimes the “good” leg will be bad and I’ll have to figure out how walk with the cane in my left instead of right hand.
What I’m saying is that this is the correct use of a cane even if you use it for different reasons than included in this post.
Making sure your cane is the correct height is also very important! Dr. House’s cane is TOO SHORT. He also uses it by holding the handle against his hip and pushing the tip out away from his body. This causes you to have lean to the side with every step. You will throw your back and/or hips out of alignment if you walk this way. Leaning to the side on your cane will also cause damage to your hand and arm joints.
Your cane should sit comfortably in your hand, should remain vertical when you’re standing still, and the height should allow your elbow to bend a little when you’re holding it standing up straight. If your elbow is fully extended when holding your cane at your side, it is too short.
^ all of this. i legit did research on how to walk w a cane before i got one. because otherwise… yeah. and i dont do it *perfectly* because sometimes it just doesn’t work with the ways my body allows me to move, but i never do that for more than a few minutes at a time.
and yeah. when tv people use canes in ways that will fuck up their bodies. im pissed. because i did have to go off google to correctly walk with one
please start questioning why you call bad people “psychotic” or “crazy” or “nuts” or “insane”.
please start questioning why your automatic response to someone who is visibly symptomatic is to dismiss them as “crazy”, roll your eyes, and mock them as though they are subhuman.
please start thinking about why you associate mental illness with being evil or cruel or mean, why you use words like “insane” or “crazy” to mean something that bothers you, something you don’t like.
this shit matters. words matter. slurs matter. this isn’t about people choosing to “get offended”.
the semiotics involved in continually associating badness with mental illness is what leads to mentally ill people getting killed by police, abused by their family members, losing custody of their children, going to jail instead of getting treatment.
It leads to losing our jobs and our friends, to our partners infantilizing and invalidating us.
There’s this ableist idea that the default is for people to have zero disabilities
and mental illnesses. That’s why there’s a concept of there being
“too many diagnoses” – because people totally assume there’s like, a Perfectly
Normal Human to begin with and that that idealized body has zero brain
issues or disabilities.
And that’s so wrong. That’s just as wrong
as assuming non-intersex, cishet middle-class white guys are the
Perfectly Normal Human of which everyone else is an imperfect copy.
We’re not made from a mould. We have endless variations
and they aren’t divergence from some Perfectly Normal Copy,
they’re literally the way life functions. There is no perfect copy. There are only variations, some of which have the privilege of being normalized.
But privileged people
see themselves as the default, and “too many differences” can seem “made up” to them, because they’re not used to relating to people who are different. Unfortunately we mentally ill/disabled
people absorb this idea too and it’s really hard to unlearn it when
we’re stuck in a society that’s constantly reinforcing it.
We
have to be gentle with ourselves and with each other and work on
normalizing variations like mental illnesses, disabilities, etc., so the
focus can be on meeting the needs of people who have them instead of
just surviving ableism.
Not only is it an insult, but it’s a major contributor to the morass of ignorance and sloppy thinking that makes all kinds of mental illness so stigmatized.
I mean. What are you actually talking about? Are you referring to someone with a psychosis? Or someone with psychopathy? Or maybe someone currently suffering a psychotic break? They’re all fucking different things. And there’s pretty much no end of damage caused by the fact that folks can just throw this word out there and conveniently conflate “person with a serious and potentially debilitating mental illness” with “someone diagnosed as a potential murderer.”*
But no, right? They’re just ‘a psycho,’ which for added fun is just as likely to be applied to a woman who’s rightfully pissed off at some dude being an asshole.
*
Not that most psychopaths** ever actually murder anyone or commit any actual physical violence, although to be fair they do tend to be pretty toxic personalities. But it makes writing supervillains so much easier, I guess.
** Never mind the fact that psychologists are currently arguing over whether ‘psychopathy’ even exists as an actual personality disorder or if it’s more of a sub-type under multiple other personality disorders.
that is a fuckload of victim blaming u got there son
okay so, no. people don’t make these jokes for the sake of upsetting their loved ones on purpose. it’s for venting, for coping. why the fuck would you make your friends feel like shit just because you feel bad??
also, mental breakdowns happen. it’s not a conscious, planned decision to act impulsive and suicidal. it’s also pretty damn shitty to say that people only make self-deprecating jokes for speshul snowflake attention~
you prolly shouldn’t suicide bait either, it’s illegal. like, literally. google it up.
tl;dr mentally ill people are not ‘manipulating’ their loved ones by being suicidal and making coping jokes so stop
Holy FUCK, anon. That opinion is unpopular probably because it lacks any trace of humanity or actual knowledge of what mental illness actually entails?? The only way I can even continue writing this is if I assume that you either lost someone to suicide, or have suicidal ppl you care about and are super worried about. That’s p unlikely, and still doesn’t make your “opinion” excusable, since that last sentence means you would actually want them dead, but I digress.
Ok, so why do people make jokes about their mental illnesses? Because mental illness fucking SUCKS, and making a joke about how much you are hurting helps a little. It’s a really fucking common coping mechanism, and among one of the more constructive ones (or, at minimum, one of the less destructive). Connecting to people in similar situations helps a little, seeing that other people feel the same way you do, that what you are feeling is not some persoanl failing, but actually a (relatively) common thing. It helps you realize that you are not broken and the worst person ever, just mentally ill. People joke about their persistent suicidal thoughts because it is one of the few things that actually helps them, you know, not kill themselves!! Tumblr is often the one place mentally ill people think they can vent about how they feel without people invalidating their feelings or putting them down. Like you are doing now, jackass.
Moving on.
A symptom of many mental illnesses and personality disorders, including depression, is low self-worth. The affected person believes they are terrible and unlovable. This person did not just decide they want to believe they are the scum of the earth, it’s just an almost inevitable part of the package. This belief is very persistent, and will remain even in the face of contradictory evidence, (AND is strengthened by assholes like you who reinforce the idea that the things they have to do to survive, and by extension the people themselves, are wrong and manipulative and terrible!!!)
People often have such a hard time trying to grasp the fact that they are loved, flaws and all. The person often believes that they must have somehow tricked or manipulated the person who cares about them into loving them. Or they assume that the carer just has yet to “realize” what a terrible waste of space the cared for is. Or that the carer is merely pretending to like them out of a general pity, not actually loving them for who they are. Or they do believe people love them, but genuinely are convinced that they are a burden to those that love them, and that their loved ones would have a much happier and fulfilling life with them dead (or, at the very least, if the depressed person had never existed).
Also, one of the symptoms of many disorders, especially depression and certain personality disorders, is “splitting” or “black-and-white thinking”. Basically how the loved one is viewed depends on the loved one’s current actions. So even if you are mostly very kind and loving and supportive to someone with this symptom, if at the moment you are ignoring them or being grumpy or distant to them or basically are not or are not able to show love at that moment, the person is likely to think you hate them or just don’t care about them, even though you don’t! And they can’t really help that they can’t reconcile past loving actions with present inattentiveness or w/e it is that lead to the conclusion. It’s just a really unfortunate thing about how their brain works and it’d be real fucking shitty to try and guilt-trip them over.
Like, honestly. I am so goddamn tired of mentally ill people getting written off as manipulative for just displaying the fucking symptoms of their illness. Fucking do your research! And if you do it and still find the need to berate mentally ill people for having different needs and behaviors than someone who is not mentally ill, then fucking stay away from mentally ill ppl forever and go fuck yourself! Yeah, amazingly, having a different brain makes you act differently. Who would have guessed!
Also, I love how you accuse mentally ill people of being manipulative when you are literally GUILT-TRIPPING and SUICIDE-BAITING in the same fucking ask. You are a fucking insensitive hypocrite and I hope you never interact with any mentally ill ppl because you will hurt them. On the off chance you are mentally ill yourself: ?????????? What the fuck?????????? Why would you do this if you know how it feels? Or are you not suicidal or just a more private person abt your mental illness and just assume that your feelings represent EVERYONE, when you’re probably in the minority by a long shot????
TL;DR: Go to Hell, anon, and also maybe do some research before you go sharing hateful, uneducated opinions.
(However, people who have never been suicidal making suicide jokes at the expense of mentally ill people can join you in Hell.)
Maybe “survival of the fittest” wasn’t initially ableist, but less than fifty years after the philosophy was created, the President/Founder of Stanford University began to publish works that talked about how only the fittest would survive our society and that everyone else had to be eliminated.
Maybe “survival of the fittest” wasn’t initially ableist but the notion of how the weak should be eliminated soon turned into the eugenics movement.
Maybe “survival of the fittest” wasn’t initially ableist but the Rockefellers and Carnegies spent millions of dollars in order to create a database on genetic information on every single family in the United States, including every single family that had “defected” genes and information on the “byproducts” of those defective genes.
Maybe “survival of the fittest” wasn’t initially ableist but the information obtained from this research center allowed them to start sterilization programs which forced women with disabilities or women who might give birth to someone with a disability to be sterilized so that they could no longer have children. More than 30,000 people were steralized in thirty years.
Maybe “survival of the fittest” wasn’t initially ableist but it wasn’t long before these scientists took it to the next level and started trying to put together a euthanasia movement that would ideally kill any American with a disability since their deaths were seen as being better for everyone all around.
Maybe “survival of the fittest” wasn’t initially ableist but there were people out there who spent each and every day thinking of new ways to kill people with disabilities. They originally wanted to use gas chambers. In the end, they settled for more discreet measures. Heads of mental institutions ordered their staff to neglect all of the patients for weeks until they all died, one by one. One institution intentionally fed their patients milk infected with TB, which killed up to 40% of them. Still others were suffocated, slipped lethal doses of medication, coerced into committing suicide, etc.
Maybe “survival of the fittest” wasn’t initially ableist but the Supreme Court of the United States once made the ruling that, “it is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Maybe “survival of the fittest” wasn’t initially ableist but a rising politician over in Germany loved these ideas so much that he actually sent fan letters to these scientists and politicians. The signatures on the bottom proudly bore his name: Adolf Hitler. And in 1938, he created Aktion T4, a program in which the Nazis went around and forcibly removed disabled people from their homes, taking them to clinics where they were killed. The total amount is controversial seeing as how many families didn’t want to report since they were relieved of a burden. But right now, the widely accepted number is 300,000. 300,000 people who were murdered in clinics inspired by the American eugenics program.
Maybe “survival of the fittest” wasn’t initially ableist but the only reason why the eugenics and euthanasia clinics were shut down in the US is because we wanted to appear better than Hitler to spare us ridicule in the Cold War.
Maybe “survival of the fittest” wasn’t initially ableist but for decades, people in mental institutions were still treated horrendously, including being subjected to lobotomies and electroshock therapy in order to try to “heal” the people with disabilities. Among them was Rosemary Kennedy, JFK’s sister.
Maybe “survival of the fittest” wasn’t initially ableist but in the past century alone, at least half a million people with disabilities were killed in the name of survival of the fittest. At least. And that’s just in westernized countries.
Maybe “survival of the fittest” wasn’t initially ableist but there are still people out there who firmly hold the belief that the disabled should die in the name of survival of the fittest.
Maybe “survival of the fittest” wasn’t initially ableist but the concept has since been twisted and corrupted.
Maybe “survival of the fittest” wasn’t initially ableist but when at least half a million disabled people are dead, and even more tortured or sterilized, you can see why the disabled community is not very fond of the concept of survival of the fittest.
People love to talk about whether or not disabled people can work
but if you can work just fine and your disability is destroying your ability to have a life outside of work (because work takes all your energy and more)
Dead silence. Nobody cares.
File this under, oh you can be active for 4 hours? You can work part-time. Um no, I have to get ready for work (30 min) get to work (15 min) get home from work (15 min) feed myself all day (30 min) maintain myself, my home and my life (15 min, yeah right), which leaves 15 min for work and absolutely nothing else.
This is so accurate, back after I’d relapsed I wanted to try and go in for one class at school so I could still stay in contact with the education system. I let slip during a meeting that I managed to drag myself to that I could manage about 4 hours of activity a week, which the teacher sprang on to mean I was being lazy for just trying to get to 1 hour class. Never matter that it was 30 minutes travel, that I would have to get washed and dressed, that I would probably still need to recover for 3 days from it.
Far too often abled people see the things they do easily as “non activities”, they don’t realise that for many disabled people these things have to be carefully planned and measured, and sometimes they simply can’t be done.
reblog bc the non activities thing seems really important words
I get X number of pain-free steps per day right now, which means that, for large conventions (like SDCC), I need to be in a mobility device. I had someone ask if I used up my steps every day before transferring to the scooter, and look surprised and a little horrified when I said “no, I save them so I can go to the bathroom unassisted.” Like, they had never considered that walking is involved in peeing.
!
Reblogging for the important point that the term “activity” may mean something very different and much broader for a disabled person with a chronic pain or fatigue related condition compared to its meaning for a non disabled person. If you’re tired enough, simply sitting up in a chair rather than lying in bed is an activity that drains energy otherwise usable for other things. A thing I knew from other people with pain and fatigue related conditions, but worth reinforcing for followers who didnt know or had forgotten.
queerhomestuck 