Can we please come up with a nonterrible word for all of the ways that brains can be disabled?
Right now, there are several forms of brain disability: psychiatric disability, intellectual and developmental disability, learning disability, neurological disability, etc. Sometimes this works fine– I can talk about “psychiatric disability” when all I want to talk about is psychiatric disability. But a lot of times it doesn’t.
On a personal level, lots of people don’t know what category their disability falls into. If someone has ADD and depression, they might not know whether their inability to concentrate is a learning disability thing or a psychiatric disability thing. If someone is undiagnosed, they may not even know if they have an intellectual disability or a psychiatric disability. And a lot of times it’s possible to tell that someone has a brain-related disability, but difficult to tell what kind of disability they have.
On a wider level, a lot of our issues are similar issues. If I’m talking about forks, or forced institutionalization, or Ocular Delusional Disorder, that’s an issue that matters for people with all kinds of brain-related disabilities.
As far as I know, there are two words for all the brain disabilities, and both are unsatisfactory. First, there’s “neurodiversity.” “The neurodiversity movement” is a great phrase and I love it. But referring to someone as a “neurodiverse person” makes me feel like a PC asshole. “Neurodiverse person” is the kind of language used by people who call fat people “differently sized” and physically disabled people “handicapable.”
The other is “bad brains.” “Bad brains” is a wonderful word which comes from Tumblr. It has a lot of selling points: it’s really clear, it’s slangy, it doesn’t make you sound like a PC dickface, and it doesn’t have the ambiguity that “neurodiverse” has about whether people with very high IQs count. But if you use it in a serious blog post, it winds up bathetic. I do not want to write the sentence “today, another badbrains person was murdered just for being badbrains.”
So. Neurodiversity community. Shape up, find an umbrella term.
Thing of Things 
Is “neuro-atypical” just too awkward to say? Because I think it’s what you’re looking for semantically, but… yeah. I’m also not totally happy with it.
LikeLike
The problem with neuroatypical is that it looks really similar to neurotypical, and people get confused.
LikeLike
Yeah, that is a definite problem. It’s why I add the otherwise unnecessary hyphen, too.
Can we just go with neuroweird or something, then?
LikeLike
I’ve had someone bring up that apparently “neuroatypical” is only for autistic people so people with mental illnesses shouldn’t use it. Idk if true.
LikeLike
Clearly you need to use a diaresis, nobody will fail to notice that. 🙂
LikeLiked by 2 people
Aneurotypical?
LikeLiked by 2 people
Isn’t neuroatypical also a term for this? It doesn’t have the word “diverse” in it, making it sound less like “difability”, but it still might make smart people think they’re queer- I mean neuroatypical.
LikeLiked by 1 person
what’s wrong with plain old “mental disability?”
LikeLiked by 2 people
Or “mental illness?”
LikeLike
there are mental disabilities that aren’t mental illnesses, e.g. autism or down syndrome.
LikeLike
I parse “mental disability” as excluding “mental illness”– I’d feel uncomfortable identifying as mentally disabled myself, for instance.
LikeLiked by 1 person
What’s the distinction between mental illness and mental disability?
LikeLike
It’s the same as the distinction between any other form of illness and disability. Blindness isn’t an illness. And cancer isn’t a disability. As examples.
LikeLike
Or to use neurological examples: brain damage may cause disabilties but is not an illness. And depression is not necessarily disabling.
LikeLike
@wireheadwannabe
I think a mental disability is some kind of processing problem, it is much harder to process certain kinds of information. Things like learning disabilities, Down syndrome, and inability to differentiate between faces.
Mental illness would be things like having completely innapropriate emotional responses to stuff; or hearing voices. Things like borderline personality disorder, depression, and schizophrenia.
LikeLike
@Ozy
I parse mental illness as being inclusive of mental disability, which is maybe why I’m confused by this post.
LikeLike
I use “neurodivergent”. You’re right, “neurodiverse person” sounds clunky and not-good, although I’d say that’s because it’s a word used to describe a population, which would include NTs, being used to describe an individual. Then again, this is actually the term the neurodiversity activist people use a lot, so if you are worried about sounding “too PC”, this is not the term for you. I don’t think people will be annoyed by the term “mental disability/mentally disabled” (I wouldn’t be), so that should also work.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I loathe excessively PC language, and “neurodiverse” as an description for a person triggers my “PC bullshit” detector, but “neurodivergent” does not. Just a data point.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I suggest we use the time-honored Anglophone approach of raiding other languages. The Japanese word “genki” is really, really close to being an antonym of the word you want, but may be a little too cutesy due to anime associations. Anybody got any others?
LikeLike
Antonym?
I assume you meant synonym.
LikeLike
“Genki” means, approximately “healthy”, so I presume he did mean antonym
LikeLike
“I suggest we use the time-honored approach of raiding other languages”
FTFY
LikeLiked by 2 people
But some neurodivergent/neuroatypical people don’t see their brain as being bad, but merely different.
LikeLike
Not to mention that in general, it’s not a good idea to name terms to describe groups of people after hardcore punk bands.
LikeLike
Which band?
LikeLike
@Susebron: Bad Brains.
LikeLike
Brainqueer?
LikeLiked by 4 people
God no.
LikeLiked by 6 people
Timely post. I need to come up with some casual way of describing my toddler that doesn’t involve sound technical (CP in this case). I kind of like ‘badbrains’, since I’m partial to that kind of humor. I think a-genki could be work. Most people I know won’t catch the anime reference. Neurontic could be interesting. Could just reclaim the old term, spaz. All I know is I don’t like any of the current terms. They don’t reflect any outlook I can grok .
LikeLike
I’ve been using “diagnosable” for more-or-less this. Thoughts?
LikeLiked by 1 person
This sounds thoroughly terrible to me.
There is already an awkwardness that exists for people like me, who are neuroatypical in a particular way but not quite enough so to meet diagnostic criteria[1]. It’s hard to know how to identify, and harder to get other people (neurotypicals more so than diagnosable people, interesting enough) to take your limitations seriously. There’s a tendency toward a binary view that either someone has a diagnosable disability, and should be accomodated (or pitied, avoided, and/or locked up, if the person is an asshole, of course), or they don’t, and everything abnormal about them is just them being difficult and/or an asshole.
It’s why people resist the idea that the “weird kids” that they picked on and/or looked down upon back in elementary/middle/high school might have been autistic. Because making the life of someone who’s just incapable of normal social interaction miserable is all right.
Using “diagnosable” as an umbrella term automatically kicks anyone who isn’t diagnosable out from under the umbrella. And there’s enough of that going on from people who aren’t under the umbrella as it is.
[1] I almost certainly do meet criteria for some sort of anxiety disorder, and probably for ADHD and/or OCD, but I’m specifically considering the autism spectrum here.
LikeLiked by 1 person
That’s fair. I like it more as a term for the issues than the people, in that it sounds less judgmental (to me) than disability, while still being a broad enough category that pretty much every way that a brain can be weird fits. It also seems potentially too broad.
LikeLike
It’s an intriguing question. I think to properly think about this it makes sense to start by asking why we have some of these different categories in the first place. After all, while there are definitely some distinctions of category that are relevant and important, I think the whole reason this is an issue is that the lines between “learning disability”, “psychiatric disability” and “developmental disability” are often blurry, with different diagnoses, traits and experiences having as much (if not more) in common with sets of people in other groups as they do with folks in the same group. Much of this is a function of the ways in which disability categories are generally developed out of political determinations used to create service systems.
For example, the term and concept of developmental disability would – amazingly enough – not exist if not for the Kennedy Assassination. In most countries, autism, cerebral palsy, intellectual disability, spina bifida, etc. are classed into different service systems (CP and SB to physical disability, ID generally as its own system and autism getting split between the ID system, the MH system and general limbo). The only reason it’s different in the United States is that President Kennedy’s election empowered intellectual disability advocacy groups to create the first ID-focused federal service-provision legislation.
After his assassination, it became clear that LBJ had no intention of continuing Kennedy’s personal interest in supporting people with intellectual disabilities. As a result, the intellectual disability advocacy community reached out to other advocacy groups representing disabilities manifesting in childhood and agreed to change the ID legislation to what would become the Developmental Disabilities Act, so as to have a stronger coalition to push forward new funding and legislation. Having lost a President with a strong personal commitment to their cause, they knew that a stronger lobby was the only way they would be able to maintain their existing momentum. Thus the category of developmental disability was born. (This book has a lot of good information on that process and other stuff on the development of the DD service system: https://www.nasddds.org/publications/nasddds-titles-for-purchase/forging-a-federal-state-partnership/ )
I should note that I actually think this category has much to recommend it in a lot of ways, and it’s incubated some of the strongest and best values framework that we see in any disability category in the US right now. So I bring up that story not so much to say that the DD category isn’t useful or should be done away with as to highlight the way that some of these concepts come about. (Unfortunately, there are many in the physical disability community who feel passionately that the DD system should be eliminated and so I feel the need to make that clear.) I think it sheds some interesting light on how the terminology and even cultural groupings we use in the disability community formed.
Personally, I like the idea of using the term “neurological disability” here, in part because it encompasses learning disability, I/DD and, in all frankness, most and perhaps all of psychiatric disability. The more we understand psychiatric disability, the more we realize that most of those diagnoses do have neurological underpinnings. That’s an acknowledgement that is often resisted in the older generations of the psychiatric survivor/mental health consumer community, where many feel that acknowledging the neurological underpinnings of psychiatric diagnoses is to concede to psychiatrists control over how to respond to them.
But the neurodiversity movement, which has always acknowledged that autism and other neurological disabilities under discussion are based on real differences in our brains, has no such problem. I think that the ability to engage with the science about how our brains work in a realistic way, while not conceding the right to determine how we should be treated as a result of our differences, is a real strength of neurodiversity compared to other past efforts at disability empowerment focused on the same communities.
Just some passing thoughts – thank you for posing such an interesting question.
LikeLike