Q: What’s an example of an invisible disability?
Friedrich: Chronic fatigue syndrome. Chronic fatigue syndrome is also known as “ME,” which stands for myalgic encephalomyelitis. is an example of an invisible disability. But something that caught my attention recently in a medical school text was the language it used when talking about conversion disorder. (Conversion disorder is a mental condition in which a person has blindness, paralysis or other neurologic symptoms that cannot be explained by medical evaluation.) The text said something about the need to separate symptoms of conversion disorder from “genuine” seizures. And I thought, what kind of message are you sending to a person who is experiencing these physiological phenomena if you're saying that there is a legitimate condition and the other is imagined? So when we talk about changing the environment around disability, we need to remember to change the language that we use to refer to people’s experiences so that it is respectful of those experiences.
