@TideisTurning wrote:
How do you define disability for yourself?
Well, as I outlined above, I really think it needs to necessitate some sort of significant internal condition (either physical or mental). It can't exclusively hinge on external problems with a person's life.
Internal problems that have been caused by external problems can certainly qualify as being a disability. But only if the internal problems remain even in the absence of the external problems that cause them. If you can cure all the problems by simply removing the external problem from the equation, then that is not a disability, IMHO.
Since my main problems are all external life problems, I don't believe I have a disability.
BTW, I am in no way belittling the gravity of external problems; they can most certainly be as devastating as any disability. I'm simply saying that we ought to take care to categorize our serious issues accurately.
@TideisTurning wrote:
Have you had others define disability for you?
I was lead to believe that, because I had found myself in need of help from the mental health system, that automatically qualified me as having a disability. If you need help, you are disabled, so I was lead to believe.
However, as I mentioned above, my problems were entirely external. I was depressed, suicidal, a little anxious, yes. But that was all because my life sucked! I was lonely; I had no real friends or family - only people who continuously exploited me; my career was floundering; and looking around at the broader world around me did not make for a compelling argument that life was worth prolonging. I did not have any "mental condition" tormenting or handicapping me; I was simply rationally and fairly appraising the lay of the land before me and finding a very bleak picture that disturbed me greatly.
I had turned to the mental health system not because I needed corrections, but because my life needed major corrections. A service which, I later learned, the mental health system does not even provide. 
Very hypocritical when you considder all that propaganda they put out promising the suicidal that "help is here for you!", but I digress...
Anyway, subsequent to being given that definition of "disability", I've gone on to encounter ever more broad and vague definitions of the concept, leving me more and more confused each time.
@TideisTurning wrote:
If you have experienced both, how did the two differ?
The major discrepancy seems to be that lack of requirement for an internal condition. I think that disability necessitates some sort of internal impearment within the so-called "disabled" person; but others seem to believe that simply being in need of help - regardless of whether the basis of the problem is internal or external - qualifies a person as being "disabled".
Going further, I believe this discrepancy traces it's roots back to our (society's) differing beliefs about what the mental health system is supposed to be doing,
Some believe that a person going to the mental health system is universally indicative of some sort of internal defect, that either needs to be corrected or "managed".
But many people - myself included - believe that there are many cases where a person turns to the mental health system with no internal defects; the problem is not inside them, but rather in the life that surrounds them. And this is what the system ought to be correcting. Fix the external factors that are making the person depressed, suicidal, anxious, ect., and you eliminate those so-called "mental illnesses" they were experiancing as a direct result of that poor quality-of-life.
So you can understand how a societal confusion about the role of the mental health system can snowball in to a confusion about what "disabled" means. If someone assumes I went to the mental health system because there was something wrong with me that needed to be corrected or "managed", you can understand how they might draw conclusions that I must be disabled.
@TideisTurning wrote:
To my way of thinking, in terms of disability and identity- at the simplest level, do you identify as having a disability? Just because others may have determined you have a disability doesn't mean you have to identify with it (including completely or as the other person has defined it) and that is totally ok.
See, my concern here is that it undermines our capacity to communicate as a society. Words are the building blocks we use to communicate our own individual thoughts, and the effectiveness of our communication depends upon both sides of a conversation having a common understanding of the words that are used to build that conversation. The greater the discrepancy that exists in our definitions of a particular word, the more and more we shall fail to understand one another properly as we struggle to communicate.
And why should we believe that our confusion will end with the concept of "disability"? Once we get into a habit of individually defining words to suit our own preferances, we will fail to have a common, useful vocabulary; our society will not be able to communicate.
So even though it might seem very comfortable for us to all be able to decide for ourselves whether or not we class ourselves as "disabled", I think there are major undesirable ramifications to this approach. It has a clouding effect on our ability to communicate with the outside world, and IMHO, this may well be the most debilitating disability we can end up suffering.
I am a native english speaker, but honestly, one of the greatest enduring hurdles of my life has been my inability to communicate clearly with the people around me. There have been many causes behind this: me making incorrect assumptions about other peoples' underlying mindsets, fear of upsetting people by openly stating truths and points-of-view I hold... But in recent years, one of the biggest stumbling blocks I routinely encounter is ambiguous language. Words that have no clear meaning - in some cases, words that once upon a time had a very clear meaning.
"Disability" definitely falls in to this box. I made a contribution to the Royal Inquiry into the Abuse of Disabled People, having been told that I fit the new, ambiguous definition of "disabled".
But the more I followed it, the more I began to see that the dialog crucially revolved around peoples' internal handicaps, and their interactions with the outside world. Having no internal handicap myself, it became increasingly difficult to see how the things I wanted to say could be presented in a way that fit the overall conversation. Trying to address the questions that the government was asking became an exercise in shoehorning unrelated statements into the answer boxes.
Eventually, it became undeniable that I didn't belong there. I never should've stuck my nose in there in the first place, because I'm not disabled, nor have I ever been. I have a terrible life, and I have been terribly abused by individuals and "the system", but my grievances do not belong in a space for abused disabled people; because disability has no role in anything I've been through.
I wandered in to that environment, in good faith, because I'd been greatly confused about what "disability" meant in this day and age. I wish I hadn't.
So I hold out this personal hope that, sooner rather then later, we can all sit down and decisively settle what words like "disabled" actually mean, so we can all be on the same page as one another.
It mightn't be comfortable for a lot of people, but at least we will all be able to communicate properly. And that's an indispensable first step to overcoming the issues that upset us or cause contention.
That's just my two cents. I'm sorry if is comes across as being argumentative, @TideisTurning . I don't mean any disrespect.
