cross-posted from: https://discuss.divergentparenting.space/post/29407
Take a moment and imagine that someone calls you disabled. Ask yourself, do you agree or disagree? What feelings come up for you? Based on your lived experiences, like your interactions with family, teachers, doctors, friends, and society more generally, how has your relationship with the concept of disability been shaped?\n > \n > Even though many governmental organizations officially recognize autism as a disability, this doesn’t mean that all autistic individuals identify as being disabled. Members of the autistic community have such varied lived experiences, which contributes to whether we each identify as being disabled or not. Moreover, how we relate to the concept of disability differs as well.
I guess that’s where I draw a line between “illness” and “disability”, at least mentally (i.e. mental illness can get better, mental disability can’t). I know some conditions have a very blurred boundary between “curable” and “incurable”, depression being a notable example, but my gut feeling is that disabilities are permanent while illnesses either get better or worse (without treatment, I mean, for those that are kept in stasis by treatment).
I’ve not given this a huge amount of thought, though, so that game of semantics is probably full of holes.