fringe friday fellowship—intellectual disability edition

The American Psychiatric Association is considering a change in the DSM-​​V from the term “mental retardation” to “intellectual disability.” In twenty years or so, the nastiness of “retard” will be replaced by the nastiness of “dissie” or something equally, derivatively caustic because it’s all about context and less about terminology when it comes to referencing those who are different and, possibly, conceptually, lesser human beings than we are.

I hate the term already, and I only heard it for the first time yesterday. Do I go around calling people by their diagnoses? Hey, there’s emphysema guy and his wife benign tumor lady. Their kids schizophrenia and dissociative disorder star on the local team of potential psychopaths and eventual domestic abusers. They bought a new car last week; it smells like sudden death from cardiac arrest.

I know the DSM is a medical reference that happens to be adapted for use by non-​​medical professionals. I’m not complaining about medical labeling since we need our doctors to know what to call that thingie growing sideways out of our other thingie. It’s the un-​​doctors who work for the state or window shop at the mall or sit next to my kids in class that concern me. We give them labeling license and it doesn’t stop. It grows worse. We get pejoratives and epithets like lame, retard, cripple, and dissie (you heard it here first) which get lumped in with racial, ethnic and sexual orientation slurs. It’s not enough to change the name, we’ve got to change our way of thinking, and why hasn’t Obama fixed this, yet? He’s had a year.

There is a post here on my blog that gets a lot of search engine attention from universities. In it, I complain about potential employers Googling interviewees and finding something offensive and non-​​hire worthy on their blogs or Facebook pages. I don’t know if the hits I receive on it are from people agreeing with or disagreeing with my position, but I find it interesting how quickly our snapshots, our mall photo booth filmstrips become our entire media portfolio within seconds.

To wit:

I had a bit of a back and forth with a daddy blogger who offered me a reciprocal publicity relationship—fringes, you pub my cause (oh, and help me rewrite all my marketing material) and I will link to your blog from mine—until I asked him to visit my blog to make sure he understood who I was. Writer, mom, occasional user of the word fuck.

Go figure, that last one eliminated me from consideration. As did, perhaps, our free fringes discussion about sex. With our partners. In our own homes or cars.

It’s the Internet, goddammit. Behave yourself.

other posts you may enjoy:

• fringe friday fellowship: better blogging edition
• answering the unasked question since 1968
• _​_​_​ years ago
• hey, wanna do it?
• fringe friday fellowship—holy moly edition