The Gentrification of Disability

“mental illness will become in time just another status marker for those who have never worked anywhere but behind a laptop, a vector for competition in the great post-collegiate race, something people put down to juice their chances…”

> I agree with the author but I believe applicants to anything in the US really need to be aware of their label and whether or not they are in a “protected class”. Personally I enlisted in the military out of highschool, that puts me into a protected bucket. Subsequently I used my experience to write my personal statements, for my CV, during interviews, etc.

If a person is not in a protected class, is regular middle class, doesn’t join the military, what should they do? Well if they are “playing the game” they’re going to join the easiest protected class to get into. Its misaligned incentives but that’s life.

The author's implicit complaint seems to be that the face of disability advocacy is decreasingly the poor, helpless wretch who cannot care for themself, cannot live independently, cannot communicate with others, must be advocated for because they themself cannot advocate on their own, cannot really be helped much at all, and thus can only be pitied from a distance; and increasingly independent and semi-independent people who can care for themself fully or partially, are fully capable of communicating and advocating for themself, can tell when they're being condescended to, don't like it, and can tell you about it, and who can be helped with some understanding on the part of others and with accommodations like breaks, alternate schedules, clearer language, accessibility features, and other possibly-inconvenient-but-ultimately-reasonable requests.

> How do you keep the schizophrenic and the schizoaffective and the bipolar and the borderline and the violent and the self-harming and the catatonic and the permanently deluded at the forefront of the culture?

He wants this to be the face of the culture, the only face. Denying that anyone who can go to a college ought to be considered by anyone at all.

I think the last point in my comparison is the most pertinent. The helpless wretch cannot be helped; they can be pitied, or locked up for their own safety, or their caretakers can be supported, but you don't really have to do anything for them. The less-disabled, they can ask you to do things that you can't reasonably deny. They can ask you to fix your website's screenreader support, and you can't just tell them you won't without looking rude. They can ask for lighter workload, and it likely wouldn't cause as many problems as bosses insist it would. They can ask you for a break, and depending on the setting, you may owe it to them. And they can tell you that it's horrifically offensive to assume that just because they have a disability that they're too stupid to make decisions for themself.

It sure was easier when this movement was represented by people who could never possibly ask you to do anything, or who you could easily ignore if they did, wasn't it?

So. How much do I need to suffer from my disability to be a valid disabled person? How much success are disabled folk allowed to have before our experience is less useful than an abled advocate?

The author circles around issues like Tik-Tok depictions of mental illness and issues with different levels of autism being lumped together, but fails to help the conversation move somewhere meaningful.