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by jojobas 674 days ago
Any mental disorder will still be seen as bad (duh), bombs or not, euphemized or not. It's an exercise in futility.
2 comments

No, its not. I have lived through this most recent shift and I can tell you going from ignoring mental health in the hopes that it will 'make you be normal' to talking about how we experience the world and offering each other reasonable accommodations has been pretty nice.
And that's not right, because labeling them as "bad" and calling them "disorders" stigmatizes those who suffer from it.
Some traits are mostly-negative traits. That's just the nature of life. I'm fat/obese/overweight/slow/thick/plus-sized/curvy. It's a negative trait I have. Someone referring to me in that way can be fine, or it can be stigmatizing. The word used doesn't really affect whether it's stigmatizing. If it's being used to insult/put me down, it's stigmatizing. If it's used descriptively it's not.

If I say to someone to "make way for the blind person walking there" I'm not attacking them, but trying to help them navigate a crowded area safely. That's true regardless of whether I referred to them as blind, unsighted, vision-impaired, differently-abled, or anything else. Similarly, If I were mocking them I'd be stigmatizing them regardless of the word I used for it.