when are people gonna stop making posts pretending anyone cares about people with physical illnesses and physical disabilities? like why do people keep making these physical vs. mental illness posts where they construct this fantasy land where people care about physically ill and/or disabled people *so much* and the world is just made for anyone with a physical disability or illness, and people are so kind and understanding when we know that’s not the case? and why even reinforce the dichotomy when a lot of people have both and they can be connected in ways like!????!
Francesco Clark’s autobiography, Walking Papers, which follows his life after an accident left him paralyzed from the neck down, is featured in a key scene in Me Before You. Clark says he was never asked or told his book would be included. He and many other disability advocates are railing against the film because of its ending.
It’s a movie by an able-bodied person about a disabled person of 2 years choosing the kill themselves and give everything they own to an able bodied person they’ve known for 6 months. This decision hinges on the fact that this able bodied person can “be happy” with their able bodied partner when the disabled person is finally gone
The actor who plays the disabled person is able bodied. The entire plot of the movie revolves around how being disabled affects able bodied persons. The lead actor did an AMA and refused to take any questions from disabled persons.
Do not see this movie. It is horrible and truly a hot mess of a film. Go see Deadpool again instead.
pro jobseeking tip: never answer these surveys honestly
also a tip: if they have a question like “Everybody steals from work sometimes” answer “disagree.”
I found this out when i was working as a hiring manager and the company i worked for started instituting these tests for managerial hires or promotions. My boss and I were promoting someone and she failed the test because she answered that question as “slightly agree” which in the results tells them that she is someone likely to steal because she believes everyone does it. When we asked her about her answer, it turns out she picked what she did because she’s cynical and does assume that people steal but didnt agree with them doing so. she almost sued the company for not promoting her based on that but chose to leave instead. We lost a good employee because corporate decided these tests were a good way to screen for “good” employees.
tldr these things are poorly designed, ambiguously worded, and structured in ways that are designed to eliminate people because the intention of the questions is never made clear. these tests are evil.
this sounds like an ableist disaster for people who aren’t neurotypical and who struggle with reading signals
When I went to get diagnosed with ADHD, the neuropsychologist couldn’t figure out what was going on, because on paper I’m apparently floridly psychotic. No, the questions are imprecise, and I am hyper-literal and extremely honest.
“Do you often see things that other people do not see?” Yes.
The question I was answering: “Are you especially observant?”
The question the test was actually asking: “Are you having visual hallucinations?”
“Does your environment ever have special messages for you?” Yes.
The question I was answering: “Does the sudden sight of a rainbow during a bout of doubt and self-loathing make you feel as though the world is trying to cheer you up?”
The question the test was actually asking: “Do you believe that your toaster is trying to convince you that the neighbors are spying on you?”
Five years later, I bombed a psych eval for a park ranger job for the same sort of thing. Tread carefully, darlings.
^^^^ that is actually such a huge issue with diagnosis!!!! and I’ve thought I didn’t experience symptoms for ages that I actually clearly had all along because of things being phrased super weirdly and confusingly 😦
And this is why McDonald’s never called me after I applied
Yeah, this is why this kind of thing in job apps needs to be illegal. A lot of discrimination is well hidden.
yeah they gave me a neuropsyche test and there were depression questions and they were confused because my answers were inconsistent.
Well no shit you asked for them IN GENERAL (I ASKED the person giving the test if I should do just depression symptoms or at all even) and I happen to have PHYSICAL disabilities too. So anything about heart rate, fatigue, being able to do stuff, was all over the place because the shorter depression tests they give at the PCP I can end up checking all the “yes” boxes off WITHOUT FACTORING IN MY MENTAL ILLNESS AT ALL.
Seriously.
Like they didn’t take into consideration stuff like MAYBE having to start using a wheelchair would effect my ability to go out for example. Or that POTS might cause heart racing. Or that Mitochondrial myopathy might cause fatigue.
They then proceeded to blame anything else on the test on the depression that was 50% not depression and ignore stuff like “suddenly regressed literally 10 years in several subjects such as reading and math” so I to this day have no diagnosis or treatment for that because the only treatment I was offered after the test was stuff for the depression that I already tried and it didn’t work.
For me, I have an issue with lying on these things because intent is so confusing to me. I think, oh, okay, this answer is obvious, and it turns out that it isn’t. OR, I think that the ‘obvious’ answer isn’t possible, so if I answer it, I get paranoid that they know I’m lying. I have never gotten a call back from any place that used employment tests, EVER. These tests are extremely distressing and should be illegal.
The only downside of the resume work shop was the woman doing it telling all us of us that we were “too young to need a mental health day.” Considering I had two different flavors of unexpected anxiety bullshit episodes today prior to that, I mental did the “::looks into camera like on The Office::” thing. Nice ableism there, ma’am.
Other moment of oddity was being a 29-year-old in a room full of people still young enough to ask if they should put stuff from high school on their “I want a teaching job” resumes.
(And yes, I know one should never read comment sections on…most anything, these days, but lo, I am occasionally weak)
People who have a disability–whether it’s a physical, medical, cognitive, or mental health issue–get to choose how they talk about having that disability. And they even get to decide whether or not they see it as a disability. If they prefer to say “I am bipolar” instead of “I have bipolar disorder,” that’s their choice, their right to deal with it on their own terms. Sometimes people use wording interchangeably; sometimes I say “I have diabetes” and sometimes I say “I’m diabetic.” My thing, my choice in how I call it.
If you see some use the “I’m __” construction and you don’t have that “__”, you don’t get to “correct” them and tell them to use person first language; you really shouldn’t tell someone how to word their relationship to whatever they may live with even if you do have that same thing.
And either way, you really, really should not ever chunk in the words “suffer from”. Because that shows your ableist ass even more than “correcting” someone about how they should talk about what they live with.
And while you’re at it, stop pitting physical and mental illnesses against each other. It’s gross. They both get told a lot of the same shit–I know this, because I live with both (type 1 diabetes and anxiety and depression). A lot of people live with both, and get thrown all kinds of bullshit because of both.
Disabilities cannot be judged by aesthetics, just because someone can walk does not mean they do not have a disability, just because you think someone is “too pretty to be disabled” or alternative looking does not mean they do not have a disability. People with disabilities all look different and you cannot assume that one is not disabled just from looking at them.
There are invisible illnesses and disabilities, so before questioning and harassing someone, re-evaluate how you think about disabilities and understand that you are not entitled to know one’s health status, for many it can be a private and painful topic, not something one would wish to discuss with a stranger.
“A Stranger Left This Cruel Note Shaming a Woman Who Parked in a Handicap Spot”: http://aol.it/1Ramk2T
Love when there are “how to tell if someone is lying/manipulating you” posts on my dash and 90% of them are things I do as an autistic person
Stuff like not making eye contact, wringing my hands, having a closed-off posture, having to control the tone of my voice, preferring to talk over the Internet… The whole damn list is just a huge presumption that if you don’t act “normal” then you’re lying
Like… Buddy. My whole childhood I got in trouble for things I didn’t do because I couldn’t make eye contact and I laughed at inappropriate times because that’s how my body decided to deal with fear. It wasn’t the greatest tbh
Although can we have a thing where a ~great detective~ accuses someone of being a murderer based on body language during an interrogation and then they’re like “I’m autistic, you fuck. This is just what I do! …Nice work being ableist and letting the real killer get away btw”
^^^This is so important. And as a criminologist, let me also add that body language is actually a TERRIBLE indicator of truth telling & deception.
Unfortunately, all of the research shows that using nonverbal behavior when trying to detect deception is not very useful.
If you doubt that claim, please see what all of the leading experts on the topic have to say (see Science News).
And using technology to detect deception isn’t as useful as people think it is (see ScienceDaily Report).
Why is it so difficult to detect deception by watching a person’s nonverbal behavior?
A detailed explanation is provided below or you can skip ahead to the next page and read why it is even more difficult to detect deception by a loved one (next page, catching lovers lying).
To begin with, there is some truth to the idea that people display or “leak” their genuine feelings when lying. But, these genuine displays of emotion—called “micro expressions"—last only a fraction of a second. As such, these expressions are too brief to be of much practical use (see facial expression test).
Furthermore, the nonverbal cues identified represent “on average” what might happen when studying many individuals rather than identifying what any specific individual is likely to do.
For instance, imagine that you have a group of 1000 men and a group of 1000 women, and you know that, on average, the men are 2 inches taller than the women. Now, say you find out that someone is 5’9”. Based on that information alone, can you tell with any certainty, if the individual in question is a man or a woman?
Why not?
The problem with “averages” is that it is difficult to use the information obtained from a large group to make claims back to any specific individual without a lot of other information. After all, there are tall women, short men and everything in-between. So, knowing someone’s height, by itself, does not really help solve the problem of trying to figure out if any given individual is a man or a woman (see Truth, Lies and Romance—provides a detailed example of this type of problem).
Second, the nonverbal cues that have been found are based on small statistical patterns—they are not strong, informative (diagnostic) differences.
This time, pretend that you have a large group of men and a large group of women. But, now the average height difference between the two groups is very small—say less than an half an inch. That half an inch may still be a statistical difference, but because the difference is so small, it is even less useful when trying to guess someone’s sex just by knowing how tall they are.
This is the same problem that occurs when using nonverbal cues to detect deception. The cues represent small, statistical differences between two groups rather information that can be used the other way around; that is, to distinguish liars from ts.
For example, some studies show that liars blink a few more times on average than truth-tellers (and not every study shows this). Now, say you notice that someone blinks several times while talking to you? Are they telling the truth or not? Who knows? To begin with, both liars and truth-tellers blink when talking (you are probably blinking right now)… And some liars rarely blink while some truth-tellers blink a lot… The graphs below show why the differences obtain are of little use when trying to detect deception…
Differences in Blinking Between Truth-tellers and Liars
So, in any given situation anything might happen, and the nonverbal cues that have been found ONLY emerge when looking at group averages.
Long story short, because only small statistical differences in detection cues have been discovered. It is very difficult to identify group members (liars versus truth-tellers) based on the cues that have been identified.
Most people, however, do not believe this claim.
Most people believe that nonverbal behavior can be used to detect deception. But, all the research shows that people no better than “flipping a coin” when trying to detect deception, especially when it comes to love and romance (see Miller & Stiff).
The nonverbal cues that have been identified are not useful because truth-tellers and liars are more similar in their behavior than they are different. And there are many reasons why the nonverbal differences identified are so small and of little practical use (see Fielder & Walka; McCornack).
First, many of the lies that people tell come naturally with no planning, thought, or effort. Lying is often automatic and effortless. Most people are not even aware of the fact that they are lying when they do it. Deception can come across as being “natural” because for many people it is natural.
Second, even if there is some stress or anxiety present when people lie—people typically tell the same lies over and over. Accordingly, people become very comfortable with their lies as time passes. In fact, people tell the same lies so often that they actually begin to believe what they are saying.
Finally, telling the truth can sometimes be just as difficult and stressful than lying. Have you ever been agitated, confused, anxious, or upset while trying to tell the truth only to have people doubt what you are saying? “High stake” situations are stressful for both liars as well as truth-tellers. In such situations, both liars and truth-tellers can get nervous and give off the appearance of telling a lie.
Or think about the problem this way: if detecting deception were so easy, everyone would do it and there would a lot few problems. Affairs, crime, and fraud are only possible because people, even trained professionals, have a difficult time detecting deception with any degree of success.
And, for the most part, people are even worse at spotting lies when dealing with someone they love… (source)
Sorry for the long response, this just NEEDS to be said & known. I’m very sorry this happens to you @medicationmambo bc it absolutely should NOT *hugs*
SIGNAL BOOST!!!!
So there’s a BuzzFeed article called “How People Treat Mental Illness Vs. How they Treat Physical Illness.” The authors of the article/post/whatever mean well, but I don’t think it would be going out on a limb to say they probably don’t have a lot of experience with chronic illnesses, invisible physical illnesses, or any long-term physical illness.
Like, part of the link text is “have you tried herbal tea,” and that is the exact same type of shit people say to people with diabetes and (probably) to folks with things like fibromyalgia.
Lots of physical illnesses get really similar types of bullshit thrown at them as is thrown at mental illnesses. Assumptions that the illness is some how the person’s own fault. Assumptions that they’re just using their condition as an excuse. Assumptions and accusations that they’re making it up/that it isn’t real.
And a lot of times, and I mean A. LOT. OF. TIMES. mental illnesses like anxiety and depressive disorders are co-morbid with physical illnesses, especially chronic ones. It can partly be the changes that the chronic illness causes, and it can be partly because of having to deal with everything the physical illness brings, and sometimes it can be any number of other factors, because seriously, it is a WONDER that anyone ends up anywhere near textbook “normal” because there are so many ways that the human body can have trouble functioning.
Articles like this are probably meant to make Joe and Jane Average (who are assumed to be not mentally ill and probably not physically ill) think about how they interact with others.
But a lot of what it ends up doing is pitting people with physical illness and people with mental illness against each other, with no real acknowledgement that a lot of people are living with both kinds.
An Oregon mother who blogged about the struggle to care for her autistic son allegedly threw the 6-year-old off a bridge and then called police to tell them,…
JESUS!
I think the fact that she and Kelli Stapleton were both “autism mom” bloggers is not a coincidence. I think there’s something very very scary and dangerous about the way most of that community talks about their children. And it’s past the point where it’s just harmful, it’s actually resulted in two separate parents trying to kill their children, and one succeeding.
This wasn’t even a murder-suicide. It was just a murder. She decided her son was too difficult, so she murdered him. I hope she spends the rest of her life in prison.
hey if you’re allistic you absolutely need to reblog this. this needs to get out there. just saying
hey how about allistics not fucking ignore this like every other murder of autistic children, dont ignore how the media is painting the mother as stressed and on edge as an excuse, dont ignore how she’s not being fully blamed and how this was an “understandable” response because her child was too much of a “burden.” dont fucking ignore this. the media is victim blaming a dead six year old do not ignore this
Kirkwall Was Totally Built On a Hellmouth 