Why? He's basically discussing the difference between people who have a disease/condition/whatever and use it as an excuse to get people to go out of their way to pander to them, and people who have a disease/condition/whatever and request only what's necessary.
Let's put it this way: in highschool I had a friend who had mild dyslexia. Once she was diagnosed with it, she ended up using it as an excuse to not work at making her writing readable. She literally said to me, with no irony at all, "I'm lucky. I get a free pass on spelling because I'm dyslexic." Later, when I was a TA at the University of Denver, I had several students in my classes who were dyslexic, because DU had a special program set up to work with learning-disabled students, not one of whom had a problem with me marking errors on their work. In fact, it was a rule that I could not treat the LD students any differently than the non-disabled students.
That's the sort of thing he's talking about: people using diagnoses - often self-diagnoses in fact, not even doctor's diagnoses - to excuse themselves out of behaving or acting responsibly, in order to bend the world around them.
I have a friend who's violently allergic to a number of things. I understand this and I make accomodations to that: I don't wear perfume around her, I always go to her place instead of mine when we hang out (because my cat can trigger an asthma attack), if I'm bringing food to an event she hosts I run down the list of ingredients with her to see if she can eat it, and so on. That's not a problem. If she were to demand, however, that when we attend a party at someone else's house, that nobody is allowed to bring something with fresh tomatoes in it because she's allergic to it, that would be ridiculous. Same as with demanding, if we all went out to a restaurant, that nobody at the table could order something with eggs in it.
Taken from one of the comments in his article: do you think that ADD children should be allowed not to work at finding strategies to overcome their problems? All that does in the long run is to harm them. Accomodate them, absolutely: provide areas where they can work that have less stimulation, maybe give them a bit longer to work at it, if medication is indicated in the circumstances, using it properly, sure, but allowing them not to work to their potential, giving them easier work that's behind the rest of the class and behind their intellectual grade level just because it's harder for them than for others isn't a stance I agree with.
My disagreement has nothing to do with failing to understand the theory he's presenting, because I understand both that and the temptation to produce such a theory. I've used something very similar as mental shorthand, myself.
That doesn't change the fact that to me it is mental shorthand which conflates the vocabulary of a condition with the ways one chooses to deal with said condition (the physical issue with the mental process, to use a shorthand of my own). I find it sloppy, oversimplistic, and a really bad precedent to present as a Grand Theory of Anything because it's so tempting a fallacy. Doubly so when people are being dropped into one of two categories, and the assertion is made that, "It's easy to tell which person is which" (one explicitly made in the comments but I think implicit in the opening post).
I was involved in a recent incident in which a professor decided that I was a "disease woman" based on my asking for a very minor accomodation. It was very frustrating to be patronized and told that I needed to "own my condition" and "stop medicalizing" when I knew already from my own personal experience (reinforced by the reactions and opinions of medical professionals I trusted) that I did own my own bloody condition, thank you very much. By the time things came to a head, he was essentially telling me to act like an adult (know what your problem is) while refusing to acknowledge that if I was an adult, I also knew enough about my own condition to explain what my limitations were and not have that explanation patronized away to fit his worldview.
In case you're wondering, the accomodation I was asking for? I wanted him to understand that my falling asleep in class was a primary symptom of an ongoing illness [Chronic Fatigue Syndrome], not laziness or lack of interest, and that all the stern e-mails rehashing things he told me in other stern e-mails the week before would not change the fact that it was a deep-seated physiological issue I could not solve between two classes. In other words, I was not asking for accomodations in the sense of making class easier for me in any way, but simply explaining what was going on and asking for a little patience while I was actively working on it. In his somewhat stone-age and black-and-white understanding of disability (which I suspect is rather similar to theferrett's), this was wallowing.
If we're discussing psychological conditions, it gets even messier because then you have to draw lines between behavior the person is and isn't in control of, as well as what is an innate trait versus an external condition (issues professionals still struggle with themselves, much less laymen). I have another close friend whose working medical diagnosis is that she is bipolar. Yes, I find it a little annoying when she gets a bit wallowy and fretty because superficially, she's being a whiny little brat. But I would deserve a serious smack upside the head for telling her to just get over it, or for judging how she deals with and thinks about her disability when the disability affects how she thinks. I should also note that her behavior when she's not in her manic-depressive extremes is much more proactive and self-controlling. Which one displays her real attitude? Is that a question that can really be answered?
And to answer your question, no, of course ADD children shouldn't be allowed to wallow. But one should be careful not to assume that "But I have ADD!" is an invalid response, and I think the way theferrett frames the issue is black-and-white to the point of being useless - if not actively harmful - to people who have a disease and are trying to work out the problems of dealing with it. It smacks dangerously of creating a theory to justify the snap judgments that yes, we do have to make about people just to get through our lives on a day to day basis, but which ultimately require far more scrupulous inspection on any deeper intellectual level than, "Gee, X really seems to just drown in his/her problems."
That doesn't change the fact that to me it is mental shorthand which conflates the vocabulary of a condition with the ways one chooses to deal with said condition (the physical issue with the mental process, to use a shorthand of my own).
Unfortunately, creating my own vocabulary to describe such a condition seemed even sillier. "I find there are, generally, two types of people: Zorbits and B'monies."
That said, there are, of course, people who will make judgments and be wrong about it. That's life, and sometimes it sucks, but the very point of what I wrote is that quite often, people will not make accomodations for you... And if you absolutely need those accomodations to succeed, you're setting yourself up to fail.
Does that suck? Sure. Big time. No question. But unfortunately, all the hand-wringing over what people should do doesn't change the face of what they do</> do. (And that's not excusing the actions of people who refuse to make way for you - I'm all for handicapped ramps and suing for accomodations when needed - but it is the way things tend to work.)
As for understanding how a condition affects how one thinks, I've seen that. I deal with it seriously every June (though it took three annual suicide attempts before I realized how deeply it was affecting me), and I've also watched my father struggle through it. The solution, however, is not to fling up one's hands and say, "I am helpless before the face of my disease," but rather to see how quickly one can find reality (or something close to it) when one is awash in a sea of chemicals that are telling you that you're useless and should kill yourself.
My family's got enough troubles and issues to fill a boat; my father's diagnosed depressive, my mother is legally blind, my uncle was hemophiliac and handicapped, and so forth. I've watched a number of close friends and relatives (and enemies) struggle through very serious issues, and in my experience it was usually attitude that made the difference. Your mileage may vary, of course, but you think my attitude does more harm than good because it may encourage people to be cruel; I think your attitude does more harm than good because it may encourage people to be dependent when they don't have to be (with the subsequent, and subtle, erosion of self-esteem that is involved).
I'm not a hand-wringer. I decided my professor and his stone-age theory could go f*ck themselves, because it wasn't relevant to me, and I've been doing fine. I know I'm doing better at college and at life than a vast proportion of healthy people, but I'm not going to further parrot my life story for Knowledge of Disability Credit on the internet.
Your story about dealing with SAD is very inspirational (I'm saying that without irony, despite our disagreement), but you make the solution sound easy and universal when it really varies from person to person. Dr. Kay Jamison (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679763309/sr=8-1/qid=1143730771/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-7576760-7837769?%5Fencoding=UTF8) took more than ten years, if I remember correctly, to come to the same insight you did, so I guess she's a "disease woman." Or, uh, maybe it's a little more complicated than that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kay_Jamison).
You're misunderstanding my point, which is not that people shouldn't fight to stand up on their own two feet but that you've essentially belabored a very obvious truism - some people wallow in their problems, and some people don't, and the second one is better - with a mass of conflated vocabulary and oversimplification of medical issues (what's a disease, how much control) that medical professionals aren't claiming to have the answers to.
You're misunderstanding my point, which is not that people shouldn't fight to stand up on their own two feet but that you've essentially belabored a very obvious truism - some people wallow in their problems, and some people don't, and the second one is better - with a mass of conflated vocabulary and oversimplification of medical issues (what's a disease, how much control) that medical professionals aren't claiming to have the answers to.
I think the core problem here is that I disagree with you that it's obvious. If it was obvious, then a lot of people wouldn't do it, and I wouldn't have received the two or three comments from people saying, "Uh-oh, I think I just realized that I do that."
I also don't think the solution is easy, but I rarely make statements as to how easy or hard something may be; I merely talk about what needs to be done. The ease of it is going to vary from person to person... But regardless of whether it's difficult or a piece of cake, the focus usually needs to shift from mostly external change to mostly internal change.
(I also think that focusing on the difficulty of a process is usually very counterproductive, since if someone's experience differs - whether they find it easier or harder - they become convinced they're not doing it right.)
A lot of people had difficulties in the terms I used, which is a legitimate issue in the structure of the essay... But as I've said I found it sillier (and less productive) to make up names to handle it. I defined what I thought it was made of fairly clearly, and said that even that language had difficulties, which is about as much as I can do. Yeah, there are elements of any syndrome that are out of your control, but focusing on the out-of-control elements is not particularly helpful.
Nobody has the answers to how much in control you are, except that you can give up your control... Which means that it's theoretically possible to have more of it with effort, to a point. Thus, I tend to think in terms of maximizing what you have. And the arguments that default - and I do say "default" - to changing the behaviors of others because you are not sufficiently empowered is generally harmful, and needs to stop.
I don't think we disagree all that much, truthfully. But I think my point is more valid than you're giving it credit for, and you think my point is poorly-expressed. We may both be right.
(And I apologize if you thought that I was calling you a hand-wringer; I wasn't.)
I think the core problem here is that I disagree with you that it's obvious. If it was obvious, then a lot of people wouldn't do it, and I wouldn't have received the two or three comments from people saying, "Uh-oh, I think I just realized that I do that."
Well, I meant the truism itself is obvious - recognition of how it applies to yourself isn't always so.
I think on a practical level of how to manage day to day life, we're not disagreeing at all - the question is how to discuss it at any meaningful level. Your point about the productivity of stating how difficult a problem is is well-taken, on a practical level. But then, I have very little trouble analyzing the difficulty of a problem to dissect it on an intellectual basis and then going out and completely ignoring that analysis in my day to day life, because it wouldn't be productive in a different context. Perhaps this isn't a separation that comes naturally to other people.
As to the language issue, I'd point out that reappropriating language is always dangerous because you don't necessarily erase the original context in doing so - but I don't disagree with the logic of how you laid out your new definitions, just, heh, the validity of those definitions and their applicability to the words you chose.
I think we've agreed to disagree, and that's fine by me.
I really liked that. Though he's preaching to the choir for me. It's good to know there are people who share that point of view. After dealing with people who don't want to help themselves, it is refreshing. Of course - I should have told him that, ne? Yes, but he already had a gazillion comments, so I thought I'd spam you instead! Heee!
Oh, and this may sound strange, but I bought you something small from the anime con this past weekend. I saw it, and knew it had to be yours. Can I mail it to you?
I had a friend who worked for the state for a while whose job was to sort through welfare applications and interview applicants to see if they qualified. She saw a lot of people who needed it, of course, but also a certain amount of people who were trying to get free money. One woman she told me about asked her if she were married, then said "I'm married so I don't have to work." My friend, who's one of the sweetest, most easygoing people on the face of this earth, finally broke and snapped back, "But I'm not applying for welfare!"
Clarification - "I hope you don't already have one" does not refer to your address, but the item. *laughs at own lingual ambiguity* <--I'm TOO much of an English major somedays! XD
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No. No disrespect meant to you or
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Let's put it this way: in highschool I had a friend who had mild dyslexia. Once she was diagnosed with it, she ended up using it as an excuse to not work at making her writing readable. She literally said to me, with no irony at all, "I'm lucky. I get a free pass on spelling because I'm dyslexic." Later, when I was a TA at the University of Denver, I had several students in my classes who were dyslexic, because DU had a special program set up to work with learning-disabled students, not one of whom had a problem with me marking errors on their work. In fact, it was a rule that I could not treat the LD students any differently than the non-disabled students.
That's the sort of thing he's talking about: people using diagnoses - often self-diagnoses in fact, not even doctor's diagnoses - to excuse themselves out of behaving or acting responsibly, in order to bend the world around them.
I have a friend who's violently allergic to a number of things. I understand this and I make accomodations to that: I don't wear perfume around her, I always go to her place instead of mine when we hang out (because my cat can trigger an asthma attack), if I'm bringing food to an event she hosts I run down the list of ingredients with her to see if she can eat it, and so on. That's not a problem. If she were to demand, however, that when we attend a party at someone else's house, that nobody is allowed to bring something with fresh tomatoes in it because she's allergic to it, that would be ridiculous. Same as with demanding, if we all went out to a restaurant, that nobody at the table could order something with eggs in it.
Taken from one of the comments in his article: do you think that ADD children should be allowed not to work at finding strategies to overcome their problems? All that does in the long run is to harm them. Accomodate them, absolutely: provide areas where they can work that have less stimulation, maybe give them a bit longer to work at it, if medication is indicated in the circumstances, using it properly, sure, but allowing them not to work to their potential, giving them easier work that's behind the rest of the class and behind their intellectual grade level just because it's harder for them than for others isn't a stance I agree with.
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That doesn't change the fact that to me it is mental shorthand which conflates the vocabulary of a condition with the ways one chooses to deal with said condition (the physical issue with the mental process, to use a shorthand of my own). I find it sloppy, oversimplistic, and a really bad precedent to present as a Grand Theory of Anything because it's so tempting a fallacy. Doubly so when people are being dropped into one of two categories, and the assertion is made that, "It's easy to tell which person is which" (one explicitly made in the comments but I think implicit in the opening post).
I was involved in a recent incident in which a professor decided that I was a "disease woman" based on my asking for a very minor accomodation. It was very frustrating to be patronized and told that I needed to "own my condition" and "stop medicalizing" when I knew already from my own personal experience (reinforced by the reactions and opinions of medical professionals I trusted) that I did own my own bloody condition, thank you very much. By the time things came to a head, he was essentially telling me to act like an adult (know what your problem is) while refusing to acknowledge that if I was an adult, I also knew enough about my own condition to explain what my limitations were and not have that explanation patronized away to fit his worldview.
In case you're wondering, the accomodation I was asking for? I wanted him to understand that my falling asleep in class was a primary symptom of an ongoing illness [Chronic Fatigue Syndrome], not laziness or lack of interest, and that all the stern e-mails rehashing things he told me in other stern e-mails the week before would not change the fact that it was a deep-seated physiological issue I could not solve between two classes. In other words, I was not asking for accomodations in the sense of making class easier for me in any way, but simply explaining what was going on and asking for a little patience while I was actively working on it. In his somewhat stone-age and black-and-white understanding of disability (which I suspect is rather similar to
If we're discussing psychological conditions, it gets even messier because then you have to draw lines between behavior the person is and isn't in control of, as well as what is an innate trait versus an external condition (issues professionals still struggle with themselves, much less laymen). I have another close friend whose working medical diagnosis is that she is bipolar. Yes, I find it a little annoying when she gets a bit wallowy and fretty because superficially, she's being a whiny little brat. But I would deserve a serious smack upside the head for telling her to just get over it, or for judging how she deals with and thinks about her disability when the disability affects how she thinks. I should also note that her behavior when she's not in her manic-depressive extremes is much more proactive and self-controlling. Which one displays her real attitude? Is that a question that can really be answered?
And to answer your question, no, of course ADD children shouldn't be allowed to wallow. But one should be careful not to assume that "But I have ADD!" is an invalid response, and I think the way
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Unfortunately, creating my own vocabulary to describe such a condition seemed even sillier. "I find there are, generally, two types of people: Zorbits and B'monies."
That said, there are, of course, people who will make judgments and be wrong about it. That's life, and sometimes it sucks, but the very point of what I wrote is that quite often, people will not make accomodations for you... And if you absolutely need those accomodations to succeed, you're setting yourself up to fail.
Does that suck? Sure. Big time. No question. But unfortunately, all the hand-wringing over what people should do doesn't change the face of what they do</> do. (And that's not excusing the actions of people who refuse to make way for you - I'm all for handicapped ramps and suing for accomodations when needed - but it is the way things tend to work.)
As for understanding how a condition affects how one thinks, I've seen that. I deal with it seriously every June (though it took three annual suicide attempts before I realized how deeply it was affecting me), and I've also watched my father struggle through it. The solution, however, is not to fling up one's hands and say, "I am helpless before the face of my disease," but rather to see how quickly one can find reality (or something close to it) when one is awash in a sea of chemicals that are telling you that you're useless and should kill yourself.
My family's got enough troubles and issues to fill a boat; my father's diagnosed depressive, my mother is legally blind, my uncle was hemophiliac and handicapped, and so forth. I've watched a number of close friends and relatives (and enemies) struggle through very serious issues, and in my experience it was usually attitude that made the difference. Your mileage may vary, of course, but you think my attitude does more harm than good because it may encourage people to be cruel; I think your attitude does more harm than good because it may encourage people to be dependent when they don't have to be (with the subsequent, and subtle, erosion of self-esteem that is involved).
Vive la difference.
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Your story about dealing with SAD is very inspirational (I'm saying that without irony, despite our disagreement), but you make the solution sound easy and universal when it really varies from person to person. Dr. Kay Jamison (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679763309/sr=8-1/qid=1143730771/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-7576760-7837769?%5Fencoding=UTF8) took more than ten years, if I remember correctly, to come to the same insight you did, so I guess she's a "disease woman." Or, uh, maybe it's a little more complicated than that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kay_Jamison).
You're misunderstanding my point, which is not that people shouldn't fight to stand up on their own two feet but that you've essentially belabored a very obvious truism - some people wallow in their problems, and some people don't, and the second one is better - with a mass of conflated vocabulary and oversimplification of medical issues (what's a disease, how much control) that medical professionals aren't claiming to have the answers to.
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I think the core problem here is that I disagree with you that it's obvious. If it was obvious, then a lot of people wouldn't do it, and I wouldn't have received the two or three comments from people saying, "Uh-oh, I think I just realized that I do that."
I also don't think the solution is easy, but I rarely make statements as to how easy or hard something may be; I merely talk about what needs to be done. The ease of it is going to vary from person to person... But regardless of whether it's difficult or a piece of cake, the focus usually needs to shift from mostly external change to mostly internal change.
(I also think that focusing on the difficulty of a process is usually very counterproductive, since if someone's experience differs - whether they find it easier or harder - they become convinced they're not doing it right.)
A lot of people had difficulties in the terms I used, which is a legitimate issue in the structure of the essay... But as I've said I found it sillier (and less productive) to make up names to handle it. I defined what I thought it was made of fairly clearly, and said that even that language had difficulties, which is about as much as I can do. Yeah, there are elements of any syndrome that are out of your control, but focusing on the out-of-control elements is not particularly helpful.
Nobody has the answers to how much in control you are, except that you can give up your control... Which means that it's theoretically possible to have more of it with effort, to a point. Thus, I tend to think in terms of maximizing what you have. And the arguments that default - and I do say "default" - to changing the behaviors of others because you are not sufficiently empowered is generally harmful, and needs to stop.
I don't think we disagree all that much, truthfully. But I think my point is more valid than you're giving it credit for, and you think my point is poorly-expressed. We may both be right.
(And I apologize if you thought that I was calling you a hand-wringer; I wasn't.)
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Well, I meant the truism itself is obvious - recognition of how it applies to yourself isn't always so.
I think on a practical level of how to manage day to day life, we're not disagreeing at all - the question is how to discuss it at any meaningful level. Your point about the productivity of stating how difficult a problem is is well-taken, on a practical level. But then, I have very little trouble analyzing the difficulty of a problem to dissect it on an intellectual basis and then going out and completely ignoring that analysis in my day to day life, because it wouldn't be productive in a different context. Perhaps this isn't a separation that comes naturally to other people.
As to the language issue, I'd point out that reappropriating language is always dangerous because you don't necessarily erase the original context in doing so - but I don't disagree with the logic of how you laid out your new definitions, just, heh, the validity of those definitions and their applicability to the words you chose.
I think we've agreed to disagree, and that's fine by me.
(Not a problem at all. Thanks for apologizing.)
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Oh, and this may sound strange, but I bought you something small from the anime con this past weekend. I saw it, and knew it had to be yours. Can I mail it to you?
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*is now afraid* XD Sure! Do you need my address?
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semievilsquirrel@hotmail.com
I'll send it out this weekend - I need to buy a good envelope for it.
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(Sent!)
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