"People with invisible disabilities, such as chronic pain or some sleep disorder, are often accused of faking or imagining their disabilities. These symptoms can occur due to chronic illness, chronic pain, injury, birth disorders, etc., and are not always obvious to the onlooker.
Invisible Disabilities are certain kinds of disabilities that are not immediately apparent to others. It is estimated that 10% of people in the U.S. have a medical condition that could be considered a type of invisible disability.
Nearly one in two people in the U.S. has a chronic medical condition of one kind or another. Still, most people are not considered disabled, as their medical conditions do not impair their normal activities. These people do not use an assistive device, and most look and act perfectly healthy.
Hundreds of conditions, illnesses, and injuries can result in a hidden disability - anemia, brain injuries and strokes, allergies, epilepsy, heart diseases, lung conditions, mental illnesses, and chronic pain are just a few examples. Yet, although we are all aware of these individual conditions, there is much to be learned about the shared needs and experiences of the hidden disability community as the unique group it is."
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Taken from the Invisible Disabilities: List and General Information by Disabled World (DW), 29/01/2026
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Link to Disabled World’s (DW) collection of articles, research papers, and documents focused on various aspects of invisible disabilities
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“Disability” is an umbrella term which encompasses physical disabilities, emotional/psychiatric disabilities, neurodivergence, intellectual/developmental disabilities, sensory disabilities, invisible disabilities, and more. You do not have to have an official diagnosis to consider yourself disabled.
Mask up, love one another, and stay alive for one more week.
A child exempted me from their “All adults are evil” rule.
Because “[i am] not a real adult, [I’m] just cringe”.
Kids man, brutal.
I don’t think you’re cringe, I think you’re the best sandwichmaker! And that makes you exempt from “real adults”
I take being called cringe rather than evil as a pure upgrade. Obviously if I had given the child my lunch sandwich they would have bumped me up from cringe to “Almost cool”
I think you’re already cool for taking this with a lot of humor
Also people complain abut ai posters for small businesses. But i’m surrounded by information posters made by ai. Wash your alternatively 4, 5 and 6 lingered hands before seeing patients! Patient violence by weird ghibli-pixar hybrids who are sort of melting into the bed is unacceptable! Respect your fellow piss filtered workers! Here’s how evaluate a fracture of an anatomically impossible leg! (LENGTH, AXIS, ROTATION. 3 DATA POINTS. WHY THE AI?!?)
That feels worse. Like not to pull rank or anything, but your local restaurant having an ai generated cat on its menu just doesn’t seem dangerous, this kinda does.
That stuff is more geared towards normalisation however information is far more insidious because of misinformation about important things.
I haven’t been around the past week as I’ve been in hospital with a severe ear infection that I couldn’t fight off due to being allergic to virtually every antibiotic now. It was a big, horrible thing and I just got home this afternoon. Anyway, hope you’re all doing OK.
finally got a letter back from my therapist to send for my disability aid appeal and its just completely wrong full of saying she did things she did not do and not even mentioning how i haven’t improved at all
Just… wow. What the hell?
I truly believe some medical professionals, just like other people, are really against disability benefits, and purposely try to sabotage patients’ attempts to get them. Many refuse outright. That’s why I asked every single member of medical staff who deals with me (like 7 different departments) for one, and out of all of those I was able to get 2 that were actually decent.
In the UK they will also accept letters from non-medical staff, anyone who knows you, as evidence. I got one from my landlady and one from a social worker, supporting my case. Could you do something like that?
I don’t think so but I will look into it, thank you. You’re probably right, at this point I’m starting to think this therapist is doing more harm than good, and even if I should continue seeing them to check off a disability box i might stop going
This is exactly how feel about multiple medical departments. For example my physiotherapy is doing nothing. When I’ve completed my current course I’m going to ask for a note saying I’ve been doing physio for years and it’s not working. Whether the physio will provide one or not I don’t know but I don’t want to spend my life having useless physio just to help me claim benefits. Same with mental health therapy, having a note from them helps but I don’t want to spend months doing that useless trash again just for a note.
Amazing, and of course now you’re left with her mess, so sorry you’re having to deal with that after all that time spent
It feels weird, being fat and disabled at the same time, doctors assume you’re disabled because you’re fat but you were fat before any disability fully manifested. It’s weird, very weird. I am afraid of doctors now despite the fact I have needed constant medical care until I developed an adult’s immune(o compromised) system, doctors scare me, so do teachers, in a nutshell any authority that can dictate if you’re worthy of living. Often you feel like you’re afloat out there, looking in at everything these able bodied people do, they earn their own money so they can eat their favourite food, their arms don’t shake when working with a frying pan so they can cook their favourite without anyone stopping them, their body has never betrayed them so they’re beautiful as dictated by our overlords, them and their beautiful peers talk about how they want a world in their image and that world seems to be the one that will come true, a world where you can’t fit in.
their body has never betrayed them
This right here is one of the things that feels the hardest to get the able-bodied to understand; personal solutions and standardized metrics will never serve as a blanket answer for the unique experiences of those living with disabilities, and just because they can do it doesn’t mean you can do it too, even with accommodations.
Yes, for us our body won’t work. We can’t fit in a nice economic plan or market. Most of these people don’t know how it feels when your back stops supporting your arm suddenly and your writing speed suddenly drops in an exam, how it feels when your legs suddenly refuse to move, how it feels your brain can’t add two numbers.
Even in cases where the disability is caused by obesity, they remain just as callous and cruel. Even in cases where reducing weight will lead to an improvement, modern weight-loss medicines aren’t properly distributed.
And methods of weight loss which can be sustained aren’t discussed only short term ones are like keto.
The statistics for sustained weight loss are just so abysmal. Our understanding of complex biological systems is horribly limited, and this is a big example.
This is one of the huge things I have against the medical “profession,” they treat each issue as if it’s separate, they do not treat the body as a holistic thing where everything interacts with everything else. This is why you get situations where the patient is medicated for one issue and that medication causes a different issue. So they’re medicated for the new issue and soon the patient has 20 different illnesses with 40 different medications, most of the problems caused by the medications.
Exactly, statistically I think 95% of diets fail in long term
Trying to help a kid learn their times table but they just paste stuff into chatgpt.
Bane of modern existence, I am glad my teacher is old fashioned she taught me how to do problems without calculator even though you’re allowed one in uni here and I am so glad she did because even calculator is wrong sometimes and even if I don’t know how to solve the entire problem by hand I can verify the results. Needless to say she despises AI.
I’m not opposed to children or anyone else fibbing or using tools. But this is the times table, it is literally quicker to do 5 times 7 in your head than to ask chatgpt to get it wrong. (Assuming of course you are capable)
I will say that they did independently develop rudimentary algebra trying to trick me. Because i decided to ask them the questions using facts like “How many stuffed toys you have” times “How many drawings you made yesterday” they would set up the prompt and then end the prompt with like “And my number of stuffed animals is X and I drew Y things”
Yea I understand what you mean but sometimes you need to do certain things the old way. Learning on screens has been proven to be less effective than learning from books for example, I wouldn’t want a kid to use smartphones or calculators for a while, I would let them do things slowly but it would have to be by hand. I am very much a luddite in this sense that I wouldn’t want kids to be using a computer until like age 7 or something and not using internet until similar age. I think something is taken away when devices are introduced so early.
I agree! One small addendum: I think 7 is too early for touch screen devices. Getting acquainted with a regular computer that doesn’t have internet access is actually an interesting way of learning to use the device slowly, especially when you don’t have many programs on it. It gives you a rough understanding on how the tech works, and then you can get slowly introduced to more modern / complex / haptic devices like smartphones or tablets later on in life. I may be talking out of my ass here because I had a similar experience, but I still feel like my usage of smartphones is more on the responsible side because I only got it after graduating high school. That is not to say I am immune to its addictiveness
Yes I agree, I am also just going off my personal experience and what I have seen in the world around me instead of any strict empirical research. That’s why I like to think of internet access as not a requirement for life but an option available whenever neccesary, having access to do much of humanity knowledge is nice but you don’t want to live in it 24/7.
Doctor agreed I can stop therapy, and gave me resources to find something else that’s free. And I noticed they have a program for ppl with mild to moderate depression but do not have anything for ppl with severe depression?
Tbh that’s fine I guess I’d rather play Minecraft for an extra hour than deal with more free mental health services anyway
they don’t have a treatment for us because they can’t prescribe a community that gives a shit about you or a society that doesn’t want us to die to fill the pockets of some leech.
Even in a society where a leech’s pocket aren’t being filled by our death, we just aren’t considered worth saving. There scientists trying to make vaccines for pregnant folks that would ‘reduce chances of autism and depression in fetus’ like they would rather spend tons of money to mess with two parts of life we barely understand (birth and brain) in a hubris rivalled by Dr. Frankenstein instead of just letting us live, like seriously if you don’t want to accomodate is, at least let us live on our own terms? Maybe support assisted suicide as an option?
support assisted suicide as an option?
As someone who has wanted assisted suicide for many years, I truly don’t understand why this isn’t an option in every capitalist country for disabled people who aren’t terminal. IME, they do everything they can to avoid supporting us - I would have starved or committed suicide if it wasn’t for mutual aid, they literally left me without a source of income for like a year and a half. They complain non-stop about how much I cost the NHS and have tried to change my prescriptions to cheaper ones that don’t work just to save money. I can’t get the help I need like a carer from the council because too many people need this assistance so they’re only giving it to people who are bedridden or have special needs. I can’t even wear a bra any more because my mobility is too bad to get one on and they won’t provide someone to help me dress. I can only wear baggy or stetch clothes, without buttons or zips and I can hardly get those clothes on without help anyway. The food bank only lets you have 9 days worth of food every 6 months. I mean, why are they forcing me to stay alive when they clearly don’t give a shit about my welfare? It’s just infuriating. I can only assume that they want to think well of themselves, and if they outright say “Yes let’s put the disabled down,” they’d have to admit they are Nazis. Easier to claim there is so much help out there and if we aren’t accessing it, it’s our own fault. And this mentality is so prevalent that it is even in evidence here on mutual aid often, with all the unsolicited advice people receive, with information about how to access help without needing to use mutual aid. Except the advice they give is usually wrong, not applicable to the situation or inaccessible to the person asking for help.
There are people who are genuine comrades but their rhetoric on disabled people is one step removed from Nazism. Listen to any doctor or medical who is a communist or any communist period, their rhetoric when boiled down to basics is “You will our way and you will like it because we don’t want to admit our thinking about you is influenced from people we hate” if they say “yea you can die” then it’ll be clear they don’t want to help anyone, they can’t just give help and a dignified death to those of us who want it.
Some of our comrades’ comments on the disabled and those asking for help have been truly disappointing.
Truly. I don’t know if ai can say this here or not but I have contemplated suicide nearly everyday since last 3 months, like man, if I won’t have a place anywhere at all then what’s the purpose then? At least ending it all would relieve the food supply of providing for one person.
I got my sleep apnea test the other day and it turns out I am breathing just fine when I’m asleep. While this doesn’t answer why my blood pressure has increased since last year, it is certainly good to know that I am, in fact, sleeping and breathing fine.
Glad that turned out OK. Hope you get your blood pressure issues solved.
Thank you love, I hope so too
That’s good news!! At least you can scratch that off the potentials list
Whew. Machines can be a hassle. I’m happy you can stay sleeping without one.
Absolutely! And thank you
Did anyone see The Lost King about the search for Richard iii? There’s a bit at the end where someone from the University of Leicester says that the fact that Richard was shown to have scoliosis shows that he really was evil - ie Shakespeare was right about him having a hunchback (even though the scoliosis would not have caused a hunchback) so he must have been right about everything else. Someone else argues “So twisted spine equals twisted personality??”
I found this webpage discussing how Richard iii was made into a disabled stereotype, and how disabled people in general have been seen as cunning and deceitful, which is even true in the modern era. After all anyone who has applied for disability benefits knows you are treated as a scammer who is faking your disability. I just thought it was interesting:
https://www.3da.org/post/richard-iii-shakespeare-and-the-making-of-a-disabled-stereotype
That is interesting, and an interesting read. It’s definitely still portrayed and perpetuated in media in the worst way, which just piles on to how people learn to view disabilities.
It seems like the media is constantly trying to portray us as awful and it’s clearly been going on for hundreds of years. I’ve started thinking it’s some evolutionary thing, the healthy trying to get rid of the weak so we don’t drag them down.
Ive been informed by a child that they no longer say skibidi, skibidi is for olds now. We ruined it.
More and more symptoms are breaking through my anti-psychotics, and I’m afraid I’m about to enter Psychosis Era Part II. Seeing how I didn’t do very well with Part I, I’m really nervous.
Should definitely speak to whomever prescribes your meds as soon as possible. Perhaps a dosage adjustment will be able to assist in what’s occurring?
I have been talking to them. I’ve tried pretty much every drug under the sun, and this eventually happened every time. I’m at the highest dose of what I’m currently on. Last time she just adjusted my anxiety med dose to try and help reduce anxiety caused by the other symptoms.
Another day where I wish I could say something, there’s no point, they won’t help, talking only puts me in more danger.
Started archiving my journals going back to ~2016 yesterday, and I was amazed to see that I was basically never able bodied.
Even a decade ago before I had any idea about chronic pain and before it really started, I was complaining constantly of poor sleep, being exhausted and falling ill basically every winter. Looking back at it, I’m not surprised that working a blue-collar labour job for six years wore on me to the point I couldn’t anymore. I guess I’m glad I kept the journal, even though it records some of the worst periods of my life, lmao.
Nearly a decade of records is pretty impressive, it’s wild what we can put our bodies through
I guess I should be thankful that my body survived the daily torment I put it through for so long
I’m afraid if anyone found out how bad my mental state was right now they’d take me to the hospital. I’m so fucking scared. Having to walk that line of underselling enough to not get hospitalized but saying enough to hopefully get something fixed. But I don’t know if it’s even fixable. My brain is so broken, and the only ones I can tell about it are internet friends who are still, in many ways, strangers; and I can only tell y’all because you aren’t able to call the cops on me.
Yea this sucks so bad. It causes my brain to view therapy as adversarial in nature and naturally that means I can’t bring myself to engage properly
And you can’t call help hotlines bc the person on the other end can and will call the cops on you (has happened to me)
Try to treat the mentally ill as people challenge (impossible)
I hope you can get the help you need soon. And I want you to know even if I knew you personally, I would never call the cops on you. Nobody deserves the treatment they deal out.
Take care sweetie, I believe in you
Yeah. I’ve only dealt with the cops once really, and it was a piglet campus security person who was called in when the counsellor needed someone to take me to the hospital. He was mostly chill, he didn’t handcuff me and he let me ride in the front passenger seat. All-in-all it wasn’t the worst experience (and I know some people have had really bad, even fatal experiences) but yeh.
I’m glad you got that lucky with the campus piglet. And to mirror what Letztertod wrote, finding emotional outlets when you’re overwhelmed can really help a lot. Crying, but also screaming, intense laughing and maybe even hitting a punching bag can help a lot with emotional regulation. Look for what seems the most feasible to you.
My best mechanism to help with my mental health has been crying, crying really does break something out of you. It is an act that breaks the numbness, an extreme emotional reaction that is profoundly living, only living things, humans and non-human animals can cry, I practiced and have almost perfected silent crying where I let tears fall without the scream and they really help with my mental health.
I can try that. I find it hard to cry, but maybe I can practice that.
I understand that very well
I want to eat ice cream but I am afraid to ask for it for some reason
