Blog#1

Un-stigmatizing Disability

When I decided to work on the topic of disability, the idea was to address people with disabilities (PWD's) beyond their disabilities, as people with feeling, emotions and ambitions, with hopes, dreams and abilities. 

There are currently one billion people (15%) of the world's population experiencing some form of disability [1] with nearly 48.9 million people or 19.4% of the non-institutionalized civilians with disabilities coming from the United States[2]. An estimated 24.1 million people have a severe disability which is identified as an inability to perform one or more activities of daily living; or is a long-term user of assistive devices such as wheelchairs, crutches, and walkers. And then there are people with non-severe disabilities, who have difficulties performing functional activities such as hearing, seeing, having one's speech understood, lifting, carrying, climbing stairs and walking; or has difficulty with activities or daily living [2] that constitute 34.2 million or 17.5% of the American population. 

While initially I intended to focus on disability and sexuality, I took a step backward to look at other disorders, that are not seen by people directly, but are felt by the people being affected by it. What does the mean? Mental illnesses; can be a description of a broad range of mental and emotional conditions, which include more than 200 classified forms like depression, anxiety disorders, addictive behaviors, eating disorders, bipolar disorder, dementia and schizophrenia[3]. These affect one's mood, thinking and behavior, interfere with your daily life and routine at school or work or even in relationships. They are complex, take time to be diagnosed or are often undiagnosed. More importantly, they are unseen, hide behind bad behavior and incompetence and are even subject to a social taboo. According to Census Bureau Reports, 7.0 million adults in the United States have reported anxiety or depression interfering with ordinary activities. 

Why is addressing mental illness important? 

When I had to go to CMU Health Center, they did not give me straight up diagnosis for what I had, it could be bipolar disorder, PTSD, personality disorder, any of these things. Human mind is complex, there's never one thing that drives it, makes you feel or behave a certain way. Additionally, as an adult, it is always a pile up of years of mental activity that went undiagnosed and unnoticed. Drugs, weekly therapy were the basic forms of help that I got. But I was still alone, when I got home, I was still by myself, with thoughts I couldn't stop and actions I couldn't control. There was still a huge gap between providing basic help that a patient requires to function "normally" according to social standards and being involved in their lives to function as they recognized as normalcy. Providing for people with mental illness is not a job, and having a mental illness should not be attached to stigma. But unfortunately it is. One of the especially painful and destructive effects of stigma is that people with mental illness are left feeling that they are not full members of society. Regardless of the objective level of discrimination that an individual is exposed to, it is the subjective perception of being devalued and marginalized that directly affects a person's sense of self-esteem and level of distress[4]. 

Based on personal experience, this level of distress and differentiation may be caused at the rudimentary level of diagnoses. After diagnosis and in between figuring things out academically, a lot of options given to me were not only to accommodate my illness in my curriculum but to protect my diagnosis from being known to anyone but me. This led me to the realization that the flaw existed in conveying information, this might not have been intentional and for my own benefit, but I absolutely had no qualms in letting people know of my condition before having told otherwise. 

This led me to pivot my venture idea still revolving around disabilities and communication, but mental rather than physical, more specifically, PTSD and /or Bipolar Disorder. 

The venture intends to be involved with academic organizations to communicate mental education to all it's students and professors by personalizing opinions and options for every "complex mind" before and after diagnosis. 

References

[1] http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/disability/overview[2]http://www.serviceandinclusion.org/index.php?page=basic[3]www.mentalhealthamerica.net/recognizing-warning-signs[4]http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165178103002075