Chronic Illness is a Disability

fuckthedisabled:

Follow up to this question.

What is a chronic illness?

A chronic illness is any ongoing illness that one does not heal from in a short frame of time, if at all.

i.e.:

  • Broken leg? Nope.
  • Fibromyalgia? MS? Yes.

People with chronic illness or progressive chronic illness face pain and distress as a result of their condition and the negative societal atmosphere surrounding disability.

The dictionary definition of disability, and why it’s a load of shit:

dis·a·bil·i·ty

    [dis-uh-bil-i-tee] 
noun, plural -ties for 2.
1.
lack of adequate power, strength, or physical or mentalability;  incapacity.
2.
a physical or mental handicap, especially one that prevents a person from 
living a full, normal life or from holding a gainfuljob.
3.
anything that disables  or puts one at a disadvantage: Hismere six-foot height will be a disability in professional basketball.
4.
the state or condition of being disabled.

This definition is inadequate because it explicitly asserts disability as lack on an individual basis; it operates central to the idea that people are incapable of participating in society because of their own inadequacy. It doesn’t take into account that people with disabilities are disadvantaged as a result of the limitations imposed by the attitudes of others.

Social Security Administration definition of disability:

Disability is defined by the Social Security administration as the “inability to engage in any substantial gainful activity by reason of any medically determinable physical or mental impairment which can be expected to result in death or which has lasted or expected to last for a continuous period of not less than 12 months”.


This definition of disability is also problematic and exclusive to many with chronic illness because it delineates disability as a static condition. Those with chronic illness are disabled, thought it is not always consistent and static. Some days they may be relatively or completely free of pain, while others they are extremely ill;  there is often no way to predict when they will be healthy or sick. Chronic illness is a disability that often leaves one excluded from certain circumstances such as  working, performing normal daily tasks and socializing, albeit not one that is static and unchanging.

yeah, I had a professor this weekend who was a judge deciding SSI cases for 20 years and said he didn’t think fibromyalgia was a legitimate disability, that it was too easy to fake, despite having started the class by saying that he hated the stereotype that people went on SSI because they were lazy or that there were a lot of people cheating the system.

(via pocwithdisabilities)