fun fact: one of the biggest ways ableism against people with complex, chronic & contested illness (like long covid, unfortunately) shows up in media is implications that the illness isn’t real.
many folks are told they have a character flaw to Overcome, when it’s a disability.
many folks are told they have a character flaw to Overcome, when it’s a disability.
https://twitter.com/bennessb/status/1474367232524304392
like if you see a character who is portrayed as Too Into Goop, what you are actually seeing is someone who’s been deeply failed by the entire medical system through the eyes of somebody who doesn’t know a thing about what undiagnosed & desperately self-managed illness looks like.
(I know goop is trash. one of the reasons it is trash is it preys specifically upon people who have been failed by the medical system.)
and this is also true about the whole cycle where an expert says the illness is purely psych & treatable as such, patients are accused of sanism when trying to articulate the ways their symptoms have been misattributed (& thus untreated) and nobody actually gets any help.
anyway you might recognize our old friends hysteria & neurasthenia when you see them in period pieces, and so it’s more important than ever before that we learn to recognize their contemporary faces.
(also, of course, “one of the biggest” ≠ “the only” or even “the only flavor”)
(there are so many more of these, by the way, I invite folks to share if you’ve been suppressing a rant on any a particular flavor of Character Flaw Ableism)
also re hysteria: when media made by wealthy white folks promotes idea that a given affliction only impacts affluent white cis women (ie goop enthusiasts) they’re often simultaneously trying to say nobody else has said affliction (false) & it’s exaggerated & silly (also false).
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