[todorus]

Do you have a problem with the words "disorder" or "illness"? Because it comes across to me that it rubs you the wrong way that so many people can be considered flawed in some way. I don't think that way of looking at people is untruthful or wrong, it's just a lot more nuanced to look at it than a person being either "sane" or "insane".

I really do wonder this as you so explicitly put "mentally ill" and "disordered" as interchangeable, which they clearly are not. Pretty much everyone has some kind of disorder, which they can address. Only a few have a mental illness, which they can learn to cope with.

Your example also serves to reduce attempts at nuance even further, by trying to make mental illness only understandable through the lens of a physical one. So one has got to wonder: maybe you are lumping way too many things onto one pile?

[faeriechangling]

First, I’ll say the APA defines mental disorders as a subset of mental illness which contradicts your definition [1]. In my experience, people tend to define these terms incredibly inconsistently and I don’t get caught up in the semantics.

Second, I would say I have both social and scientific objections to the concept of mental disorders.

Scientifically, the definition of what is considered a disorder is INCREDIBLY subjective. The DSM-V definition includes language like “impairment in an IMPORTANT area of functioning” and “reflects a dysfunction”. Being gay and transgender are two things that were considered disorders and no longer are. Generally the reasoning as to why these are not mental disorders is that being gay/trans does not make somebody intrinsically unhealthy and some of the things we see like higher suicide rates in those groups are a result of social stigma… which are ALL things I can rather trivially claim about many cases of autism.

Socially, it’s just unnecessarily insulting to call people dis-ordered. In the context of autism, it is well known it can present as a combination of strengths and weaknesses, but the mere existence of weaknesses gets the insulting label of “disorder”. This shows a condescending sense of superiority among the doctors who coined “Autism spectrum disorder”. I don’t feel medical language like disorder or illness is very nuanced at all, I feel it’s reflective of blasé and thoughtless generalization and the language mostly serves to stigmatize which is why people got mad about it being used to describe trans people.

[1] https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/what-is-mental-...