Post No.: 0822
Furrywisepuppy says:
Hidden or invisible disabilities, diseases or disorders include learning difficulties; visual, hearing, speech or motor impairments; mental health conditions like schizophrenia, anxiety, depression or gambling addiction; chronic pain or fatigue; cancer; endometriosis; scoliosis; urinary tract infections; autoimmune diseases; allergies (which can start developing at any age); and more…
In brief, there are a vast number of hidden, mental and physical, illnesses or conditions that aren’t immediately obvious to those looking at someone with one of them.
Many hidden ailments are also those that doctors can struggle to diagnose, and sometimes even the entire medical community yet understands. Mysteriously recurring infections, unusual skin conditions, stomach problems, dizziness or feeling faint, heart palpitations, aches, chronic fatigue or pains – if doctors cannot find the root cause of these then they shouldn’t automatically say, “There’s nothing wrong with you” but rather, “With present understanding, we cannot yet find the cause of your problems.” One of the worst things to ever hear is that one isn’t believed despite the things one definitely experiences.
Struggling to find a diagnosis isn’t actually unusual in medicine – there are over seven thousand rare diseases currently identified that require referral to extremely specialist professionals to diagnose. One can at least take tests to rule out things like cancer.
Those with externally-invisible and undiagnosed conditions or medically unexplained symptoms would desperately like to have a diagnosis and label for what they’ve got – even if a cure or treatment isn’t forthcoming – because it’d help them to feel like they are believed when they say that they experience their symptoms. Yet even if a treatment, like antibiotics, appears to help despite not knowing exactly what’s wrong with a patient, some doctors can believe that a patient is making up their problems.
Someone’s condition might affect their mood, thus it can be hard to disentangle someone’s apparent personality with what they’re suffering from. Most of us are tetchy and less gregarious when we’re in pain hence it’s possibly the situational factor of the pain more than someone’s permanent personality? Constantly not being believed might itself make someone just dislike being around others too.
One’s physical health has a tendency to affect one’s mental health, and vice-versa – a physical injury or deformity could lead to depression, or social anxiety and not wishing to go outside could lead to poorer physical health. And those with hidden physical disabilities in particular are more likely to have mental health problems like depression or anxiety, partly because they have to combat the way others don’t believe they experience their difficulties. So they’ve got to pretend they’re okay – ironically to not look like they’re pretending to be in pain!
We may presume that accepting someone’s anxieties will just reinforce them. Of course it’s not about feeding their worries but if we deny someone’s feelings, this just adds to their distress because they won’t feel like they’re being believed. So if you care about results, and the result you care about is minimising someone distress – believe them, then comfort them. Build their courage at a better time.
If you’re not believed, if you find it difficult or it takes a long time to get a diagnosis, if you get wrongly diagnosed, or if you otherwise have poor experiences with healthcare services – then it’s going to make your suffering feel even worse. Well stress contributes to pain, and all the above add stress, as can grief or trauma. This is why sharing your experiences with others who’ll believe you can help reduce this additional distress.
Even if a source of pain has been diagnosed, it mightn’t appear immediately physically life-threatening – but chronic pains can lead to depression and in turn the risk of suicide in extreme cases. Therefore it’s naïve to dismiss someone’s chronic pain as non-life-threatening. Post No.: 0226 explained how the experience of pain is all in the mind, but our experiences are our realities.
Many autistic people learn how to deliberately mask their natural behaviours by doing what’s socially expected of them, like to give eye contact, but not too much, and by rehearsing their social interactions. This is extremely effortful to maintain though, plus it can mean that many of them only get diagnosed much later in life.
People with conditions like schizophrenia are sometimes accused of ‘not looking disabled’. But what is someone with a mental illness supposed to look like if you think that someone who actually has one ‘doesn’t look like they have’?(!) They affect the mind. There are many different types of mental illnesses. Even those who have the same mental illness diagnoses can have different symptoms (just like those with a cold can have more of a headache or stuffy nose instead of a runny nose or cough). And some can keep their symptoms hidden better than others. Judging based solely on what can be seen on the surface leads people to more likely disbelieve in mental health problems or hidden physical conditions – it’s just another context where lazy, superficial judgements are prone to error.
People understand that computers can have hardware and software problems, and they’re both as real and serious as each other. Well organisms with their brains can have physical and mental problems and they’re both as genuine and affecting as each other too. Similarly, a computer can still operate but sub-optimally with a minor software bug (users mightn’t even know that their computer is running a little slower than it could be). And an organism can still operate but not as perfectly with a mental health condition (that they’re maybe trying to deliberately suppress and hide from others) too.
Well we shouldn’t be surprised anymore that the mind affects the rest of the body and vice-versa because it’s all physical. From a scientific perspective there’s never been any compelling evidence of immaterial souls to account for or to affect anything, and we’ll arguably solve more clinical problems and serve greater justice if we just understand and accept this. These are ultimately physical problems in a physical world hence if we have sympathy for someone whose leg is broken then we should have sympathy for someone who has an externally-invisible mental health problem too.
Long COVID or Post-COVID syndrome, which involves symptoms like chronic fatigue, brain fog, muscle pain, breathlessness and more, should hopefully have made the medical community investigate ailments like chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) or myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) more earnestly when patients complain about chronic tiredness – or literally any other problem. Other ‘long’ versions of diseases exist too, where some individuals take longer to recover than others or never truly recover at all, like from influenza.
There was/is currently no blood test or scan that can diagnose Long COVID accurately >99% of the time, and people with it can seem okay one moment but quickly tire the next – but so many independent individuals developing the condition globally during the pandemic cannot all have been suddenly colluding in making something up(!) Xenon gas MRI scans have now been trialled to identify lung damage, and visceral fat levels around the organs seem to be associated, but the medical community currently still needs to learn much more about the physiological symptoms and causes before it can say that it sufficiently understands the syndrome.
For conditions, like Long COVID, that are in the present spotlight and/or aren’t so rare though, they’ll receive the attention and research funding to try to solve – whereas those with much rarer hidden conditions aren’t as fortunate, as they’ll struggle to find cures or treatments being researched and developed for their condition; or struggle to even understand their condition or be believed by others.
People with hidden or non-obvious disabilities can even be mistreated by ‘moral vigilantes’ who confront them when they’re using disabled toilets, parking spaces or other facilities designated for use only by disabled people. They’re told, “You don’t look disabled” or are queried if they’re seen to be having fun because ‘disabled people surely aren’t able to have some fun now and again’(!) It’s yet another expression of the problem of a society that judges too much according to external appearances. We’ve got to learn to stop judging people too heavily according to shallow information. Woof!
Historically at least, universities were largely useless and job centre services were horrendously, if not sometimes actively, ignorant about mental health issues. Hopefully one day everyone will treat those who are jobless or homeless, who look like tramps or unkempt, who seem downtrodden or pessimistic, etc. with empathy and compassion first rather than high-and-mighty aloofness or condescension.
Well regarding jobs – those with disabilities might be damned if they don’t get a job because they’ll be accused of being a drain on the system, yet if they do get a job then some people might think that they don’t have a disability to complain about! Claiming welfare is also often an arduous process and takes ages, as if to discourage the seeking of support. Benefits claimants often get looked down upon, treated as lessers and demeaned, rather than lifted, at social security centres. There are too many cases where claimants have committed suicide due to how they’ve been treated during their applications. The very traits that make some mentally vulnerable people highly exploitable by grooming gangs make them highly loyal workers who will do whatever they’re told, which makes them worthwhile employees.
There are also all sorts of preconceptions like ‘you can’t be x because you’re y’, such as ‘you can’t be depressed because you’re rich and famous’ (there’s evidently far more to happiness than having money or fame) or ‘you can’t have a fear of heights because you’re so tall’ (but no one is over 20m tall!)
Too many people also assume that if someone is registered as blind or deaf then they necessarily cannot see or hear anything whatsoever respectively – but there are different degrees of sight or hearing impairment and if you cross a certain criteria then you can still be registered as blind or deaf even though you can still see or hear some murky images or muffled sounds. The warmth of a light or the bass of a song can still be felt too.
Sometimes you wish you had something worse – or really less hidden and more superficially visible but not as practically bad – so that others would take your pain more seriously. Yet you mightn’t be able to win either way because some quite visible health problems are mistaken for drunkenness, like ataxic cerebral palsy! So our under-education can lead us to assume that someone is lacking personal control rather than has an unpreventable health condition.
We probably all frequently walk past or sit next to people and not know that they’re suffering from something hidden or private in their lives. But they shouldn’t need to wear a badge to tell everyone what they’ve got. We should all just be kind to everybody, regardless of whether or not we think they have a hidden disability, disease or disorder. So if you see someone taking their time crossing the road, if they’re mute, quiet or conversely moody or easily triggered, or otherwise seem to be ‘bothering you’ or ‘acting weird’ – then first consider if they might have a hidden condition? Your unthinking instincts to harshly judge may be faulty. Those with hidden or undiagnosed health conditions can, or should be able to, better empathise with others who also have hidden or undiagnosed health conditions.
…So we need to all be better educated to understand that not all ailments or conditions are visible on the outside. And – like in many other contexts – we need to stop judging people and things so shallowly in order so that we can better understand and accept the furry truths.
Woof! If you have a hidden or non-obvious disability, disease or disorder then you can share your experiences of not being believed by others if you wish, by using the Twitter comment button below.
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