#lateral ableism

[flowercrowncrip]

I just saw a video of someone saying something along the lines of “being without ADHD medication is like being without a wheelchair! If people were waiting this long for wheelchairs and having to crawl around their homes then something would be done immediately, so why can’t I get ADHD meds??”

And just, can people stop assuming that wheelchair users get handed everything on a plate. Because we absolutely are not.

People wait months and years for wheelchairs – yes, even non ambulatory people. That’s months and years of suffering, of crawling or being confined to bed or stuck in unsuitable wheelchairs.

Yes, medication shortages are serious and need addressing… but making comparisons to wheelchair users when not knowing a single thing about the processes of accessing a chair in various countries is not the way to go about it.

[callmemanatee]

I don't know which autistic person needs to hear this, but...

Other autistic people who act childlike or have childlike interests are NOT the reason you get infantilized.

The rainbow-haired, plushie-hugging, stim-dancing autistic you saw on tiktok is NOT hurting you by existing.

Let your fellow autistic people be themselves in public.

And STOP blaming autistics who express themselves differently than you for society's ableism.

So many of us have trauma from therapists or parents policing our mannerisms and telling us our interests or clothing were "not age-appropriate". We are not —I repeat, NOT— going to turn around and inflict that same ableism on each other.

[defectivegembrain]

Oohh wow you're autistic too and you can do that thing just fine? Woah do you want a party? A big loud smelly very social party? Should we invite Temple Grandin?

[magnetothemagnificent]

Non-ADHD and non-autistic disabled people whose only idea of ADHD and autistic people is shaped by media depictions of a nerdy white boy or a quirky goth girl with low support needs: "Yeah ADHD and autism are destigmatized and we should ignore people with ADHD and autism in favor of real disabilities. I am very smart and progressive."

Lateral prejudice towards other disabled people will get us nowhere.

[neuroticboyfriend]

the whole "autism isn't a disability" thing made me feel guilty for even slightly recognizing how it has disabled me. and i want anyone going feeling similar to know it is okay if autism is a disability for you. someone else's experience being different from yours doesn't make your experience wrong. it's not fair at all for anyone to tell you you can't be disabled from autism. and the solution to ableism against autistic people is not to invalidate disabled autistic people. our struggles matter and we deserve inclusion and support. i promise.

[bonelessenthusiast]

“we don’t have to listen to high support needs autistic people because they can’t voice their opinions, the greater autism community can advocate for them” holy shit do y’all not see how much you sound like an autism mom.

[voidoftheotherside]

Happy autism awareness and acceptance month!

Unfriendly reminder that if you are advocating for autism to not be considered disabled you are advocating for the removal of supports many of us need to function and stay alive! It is by definition a disability, and you should be listening to medium and high support needs autistic people more!

[igotthebees]

The five scariest words I could say according to my peers: "I'm going off my antipsychotics" aka a Disability Pride Rant about conditional autonomy

It's disability pride month and so I want to take some time to talk about concepts that I see rampant in both abled/neurotypical/whatever you want to call it spaces and in disability spaces as well, which I have jokingly summarized before as "Good Mentally ill/Disabled People Can Have Autonomy, and the Bad Ones Cannot".

More (a lot more) under the cut

I can guess what you're thinking by now. "There are no bad disabled people Nix!!!" I entirely agree. But in mental health and neurodivergent spaces especially I find that there is a lot of internalized and externalized hatred towards people with stereotypically "severe" symptoms, and in so many cases I've found myself caught in a West Side Story-esque battle between the Depressed and Anxious vs the Manic and Psychotic (which is frustrating because we should be friends or lovers! why is my PTSD and trauma history dismissed when I admit that it causes psychosis as well, why are my friends treated better as a whole when they go in for help for depressive episodes than for manic episodes?)

Sidebar, someone is inevitably going to stop reading at this point and scream at me how they've been treated horribly for their very severe depression and I am not only discounting their experience, I am making up an oppression scale, or using stereotypes, or even fabricating that because I am psychotic and dissociative I am better than them or have suffered more. That's really not the intention? I am simply looking at things from the perspective of my own extensive psychiatric hospitalization history, and from perspectives friends have told me. You can absolutely have depression and/or anxiety and suffer more severely than someone with psychosis - but the way the system treats the two of you is going to be severely different. No one escapes the psychiatric system unscathed, but I've been hospitalized three times, one time labeled as traumatized and depressive, another as having BPD, and yet another as an official schizophrenic and they were three very different forms of hell despite minimal symptom changes.

As one girl in a partial hospitalization program said to my face without a hint of understanding of how fucked up it was: "There are two kinds of psych hospitals. There's the ones for us who just want to get better - and there's the place they put the schizophrenics".

Where does autonomy come into this essay that is getting very long very quickly? I've been experiencing episodes of psychosis since I was 17 years old, diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 21, and finally undiagnosed with schizophrenia and rediagnosed with autism and severe PTSD with episodes of psychosis at the age of 24. I have been on 8 different types of antipsychotics in 3 years. Three days ago I stopped taking my antipsychotics entirely after nearly 6 months of slowly tapering off them and under heavy observation.

And it's scaring the shit out of people.

I am not a walking time bomb, compared to what people think. The last time I had any sort of delusion or hallucination was nearly a year and a half ago, (and it was while still on heavy-duty sedatives! Medicine isn't always a magic fix, even when it does make things better). But even if I was actively hallucinating this very second, shouldn't what medicine I take be my own choice, especially since I have been cleared multiple times as not a danger to myself or others and am being closely medically followed in case that changes? (not that I personally believe that drugging someone is appropriate even when they are reactive but let's start with mad liberation 101) How come it was so easy to talk to my doctors about going off some of my anxiety medication and lowering my antidepressants but the minute I said I didn't want to be on antipsychotics the word "insight" was thrown out?

Just a warning: the concept of "insight" sucks. Yeah, okay, a large portion of people treated in hospitals for delusions or mania aren't aware of how severe or disruptive their own symptoms are. I've even experienced that before during an episode - I was having pretty significant speech symptoms and didn't realize until someone sat me down that I was acting any different than typical. (someone's going to inevitably bring up double-bookkeeping and my response is that's genuinely a real thing and helpful to talk about but it's not everyone's experience and I really wish that in normalizing it the experiences of people with severe reality distortion weren't erased or said to be an exaggeration).

Anyways - insight as a concept has been abused to hell and back to take away people's autonomy and further situations of severe abuse. When I came forward about my childhood abuse I was gaslit and coerced into telling a doctor that my previous accounts were a delusion and false memories (which aren't even an evidence-backed phenomenon but I digress) and was promptly diagnosed with the aforementioned schizophrenia.

Even other people diagnosed with psychosis have come to me and expressed horror that I am getting off my medication. I can't have a single bad or frantic day without having to do a checklist of if I'm returning to an episode, either because another person suggests it or because it's been engrained so heavily in my head that I'm a ticking time bomb and I know I will lose all my rights again in an instant if I exhibit certain symptoms publically.

Where is this going? Who knows lol, I guess my point is that this July think about how you treat autonomy even in the "crazy of the crazy" or the "ugly disabilities". Think about what you would fight and scream and cry about if it ever happened to you or your friends due to a diagnosis, and then ask yourself if you're just as mad when it happens to the psychotic and schizospec and bipolar communities; when it happens to people with intellectual disability or cognitive disability; people with complex diagnoses and physical disability too; the visibly disabled and facial difference/limb difference community; people with sensory disabilities - even people with your same disorder but higher support needs. Let's not pit ourselves against each other - I'm not magically a better or more deserving person for being crazy and medically complicated, sure, yeah, got it... but I'm also definitely not less deserving of respect because I've got diagnoses that make a lot of people (including other marginalized people) uncomfortable.

And I have to, of course, discuss for a second before I finally shut up and stare at a wall how every single thing I said is colored by my experience as a white psychotic and that being a person of color (particularly black) makes the things I've talked about significantly worse - schizophrenia actually is treated the way it is in society because it was used as a diagnosis in the 1960s in America to call leaders of the Civil Rights movement delusional and dangerous (in the 1920s and 30s when it was really popularized as its own disorder outside of the schizophrenia and/or autism diagnosis of dementia praecox, schizophrenia evolved into a disorder given to white women who said inappropriate things or couldn't take care of the house correctly or wouldn't marry, thought of as silly and delusional but harmless and needing help... which is also fucked up and politically motivated and fuck that, but the disorder was actually changed significantly when it was primarily used to target black men to include sections about violence and dangerousness that weren't included when it targeted white women. The cultural view of schizophrenia as a violent disorder that persists even today is due to racism).

(Required reading for every single person alive who can handle psychological and or/racial theory but especially those going into the medical field is "The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disorder" by Jonathan Metzel, probably the greatest and most eye-opening book I have ever read, ironically enough I don't have it anymore because I gave it to another person to read in residential and he then stole it and got kicked out of the program)

[weirdstrangeandawful]

‘You’re lucky you’re able to be out as disabled. I have to be closeted for my own safety.’

My guy, it is no safer for me than you. I just don’t have a choice! It becomes pretty obvious the minute I collapse, have a seizure, suddenly lose the ability to walk, and/or have to pull out a mobility aid or medical device.

Can we please stop saying that visibly disabled people have it easier? We don’t. Trust me. My disability was invisible for much of my life and some of my disabilities are still invisible.

I am not ‘lucky’ just because you could witness the medical episode.

[crippled-peeper]

this is the funniest sentence I have ever read. I cannot believe people like this actually exist

[clownpuppysposts]

Being Autistic in leftist spaces can be annoying because most expect you to be level 1

They don't understand why I communicate worse than the other Autistic people they know and don't understand why I can't do certain stuff

And aside from that I'm physically disabled too

[crowpunkcognitivedecline]

this is a cripple punk post; ableds must tag reblogs with #i’m able bodied

stop calling ND people’s ableism against physdis folks “lateral ableism.” it’s not lateral.

the vast majority of physdis folks are ND. while ND people can absolutely be disabled, ND disability works and is experienced differently, and isn’t just “physdis but mental”

ND people’s ableism against crips isn’t “lateral.” it’s ableism with an excuse.

[defectivegembrain]

I have had another autistic person tell me "it's not that loud" in the same dismissive way as neurotypicals while I was in pain

I have struggled to accept that this same person was actually autistic because he was so different from me and I hadn't learned better yet

I have had other autistic people not understand how I can be so very restricted in my interests and averse to change

I have believed in the past that I must be cold and emotionless because that's what the popular image of my diagnosis was

I have seen the posts saying autistic people don't really struggle with sarcasm or metaphors or empathy or social cues or managing special interests or or or

I have seen on the other hand autistic people dismiss others' autism because they don't find some things as hard

"Just find other autistic people" isn't some magical foolproof solution to loneliness and being misunderstood

[lore-gore]

You do realize YOU'RE being ableist right now? And you being disabled doesn't excuse it.

That person you mentioned literally explained "hey, I'm sorry for being mean, I'm autistic so I'm not always aware of it."

You have every right to be mad but I think their apology is valid.

Oh my god! Having a disability affects you in negative ways?!??!

And yes, being autistic makes you disabled you dumb fuck.

[neuroticboyfriend]

yeah ableist abuse from abled people is traumatizing but there's something uniquely hellish about ableist abuse from other disabled people.

and i dont say this to downplay abuse from abled people at all. i just mean it's an utter mind fuck when even other disabled people treat you like a broken mistake who's just lazy and selfish, put you into dangerous or distressing situations, etc.

you're left feeling completely alone in the world and that there's something uniquely wrong with you, specifically. not just you as a disabled person. you, all of you, as if your entire existence is just wrong.

you have an especially hard time understanding you are truly disabled, because other disabled people have taught you, specifically you, that it doesn't fucking matter. limits, wants, needs - none of them are real to you anymore, cause no one else saw them as real. not even the people who should understand.

so all you're left with is a deep rooted sense of shame about your literal existence as a lifeform. but it's not meant to be like that. you're you, and disability is a spectrum. there's nothing wrong with you. the fact other disabled people don't understand that says more about them than it ever will about you.

[pumpkinspicedmochi]

I hate when I see posts where its like "autistic people don't do -insert whatever trait that the poster hates but most times is an autistic trait some people have- they do -random probably positive thing - instead!"

is your advocacy really that if you exclude other autistic people to push some narrative ..? think about it

pretty sure most of y'all are just advocates for "aspies" / "aspie supremacy"

(for example) "autistic people aren't obsessed with routine and have a meltdown/get angry when they don't have it or its interrupted"

(the post I reblogged that listed some "unpleasant" autistic traits so that's a good example too, we exist)

well I do those things , the ones you said autistic people "don't do" now what? so you'll just exclude me and everyone else who does that from your advocacy huh? soo..ya'll just gonna pretend the "negative" or "annoying" autistic traits don't exist

I feel like I seen someone else talk about this too (I think it was about the empathy thing but its connected to this so ) but I just seen a different but similar post and they have the nerve to put it in the "autistic positivity" tag..