The LGBT community needs to support all its members
This is Pride month, and while I want to celebrate, I feel it is more important to discuss injustice and oppression. With the protests(and occasional rioting) that is going on all over the US, I feel it’s important to discuss the intersectionality of the LGBT community, and how the community has, in large part, erased…
Victimhood: the identity that just keeps taking
When I started writing last week’s post on ableism, I recognized that the single behavior that bothered me most was this man’s insistence that his disability was the heart of the problem, followed by his insistence that he was the victim. This post digs into the victim identity, and the emotional shift from having been…
Disabled people can practice ableism too
Ableism is a large issue and one that occurs within the community as well as outside of it. Over the past few months I have been processing through a series of negative interactions and now that the issue is concluded, feel that I can glean some important lessons from it and move myself forward from…
Let’s talk about stress during COVID-19
The biggest thing in the news for the past several months has been COVID-19, a novel coronavirus that has been spreading around the world and killing hundreds of thousands of people. In some ways, I’m very tired of covering it – in others, because it is constantly on my mind, I’m feeling like I need…
What does it mean to “go on disability”?
The honest answer is that there are a lot of possible meanings. The most typical at this point is to receive Social Security Disability Insurance benefits(SSDI) or Supplemental Security Insurance(SSI), but there really are a lot of additional types of “disability” benefits, each of which has its own set of rules, regulations, and durations. This…
Living through the COVID19 pandemic
t’s that time again, I’m writing in response to A Chronic Voice’s monthly linkup. May prompts: upbringing, forseeing, panicking, accessing, soothing Times are scary and stressful. I am at a strange place in my life, where I am doing what I can to stay positive and hopeful, while at the same time feeling like not too much…
My FND diagnosis journey
After some thought, I decided that the most appropriate way to end FND Awareness month was to talk about my early experience with FND – from when my symptoms started to when I actually recieved my FND diagnosis. This is a journey that took a bit over 3 years, so that you have a sense…
How psychiatrists, psychologists and psychological tools help FND patients
Functional Neurological Disorder is a common but infrequently diagnosed neurological condition that appears to be on the boundary between neurology and psychiatry. When I was diagnosed in 2003, it was labeled as a psychiatric condition that required a neurologist and a psychiatrist to diagnose. Since the mid-2000’s there has been a huge push by both…
FND and the placebo effect
Functional Neurological Disorder is a neurological condition, but how it works and the processes associated with it are right on the boundry between neurology and psychiatry. While characterizing it as neurological is very helpful for those of us with the condition and for the researchers studying it, the fact remains that many aspects of FND…