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I don’t think it’s really helpful to try and sort disorders by how socially acceptable they are. I mean, you say ADHD is pretty commonly accepted, but just earlier there was a thread on this site where some person was insisting ADHD is fake. And even among people who agree it’s real, many downplay it and don’t understand that it can seriously impact quality of life. Like “oh, you just don’t like working and can’t sit still, everyone feels that way sometimes, you’re not actually disabled”
idk I guess what I’m getting at is that all neurodivergent ppl have to deal with stigma, and it’s possible to talk about the stigma you face without also saying you have it worse than ppl with certain other disorders. That really doesn’t help
Like, I sure wish ADHD was “not really looked down upon in any significant way.” Would’ve saved me a lot of childhood trauma
In a highly hierarchical society, no wonder everything gets hierarchized. SSRI meds are very profitable, so no surprise ADHD/depression/anxiety get more limelight. Try to get lithium anywhere on the other hand...
Any ND person who can mask is immediately in a better place than people who cannot, that's just how I see it
I mostly get people telling me my ADHD/depression isn't real and that I'm making excuses. I guess that's why we're more accepted. People think we're just lazy instead of ND
There have been a bunch of archetypes to understand ADHD behaviors in media, too. Usually not super flattering, but way more varied and sympathetic than most other ND people get
Oh yeah don't get me wrong we are way more accepted than we used to be and there is def the problems that the OP talked about
There are people who say "ADHD people are making excuses" and then there are people who say "capitalism tries to mash people into the cogs which produces ADHD symptoms". So even if they say the "disease" isn't real in some genetic sense, they acknowledge that the symptoms are causing unnecessary suffering. People have different living conditions and therefore develop different variants of those symptoms. None of this means drugs are useless. Same with depression. As someone who definitely has one and likely the other these arguments appeal more to me, but I could be missing something?
Yeah, for sure there are forms of ND that seem to be more or less stigmatised. I think partly it's because people feel like they can relate to stuff like depression and anxiety more than they can to ASD, schizophrenia, etc. - plus they haven't been fed a bunch of media that tells them that depressed people are going to murder them. Contemporary capitalism (at least in the imperial core) also demands a lot of affective labour that helps create structural hierarchies that can fuck over people with certain disorders (e.g. schizophrenia, ASD) more than others.
People's 'tolerance' and acceptance for the less obviously stigmatised forms of neurodivergence is often pretty shallow though. For example, it's become pretty clear that some people I know think that social anxiety is the equivalent of them just not wanting to do some social event or something and think I'm just being lazy and nervous in the way that they feel sometimes. Instead of it being something that is often totally overwhelming, will consume all of my energy and thoughts in the days before, make me feel like I'm going to die during, and then plunge me into depression for days after as I run over how fucking humiliating it feels having badly disguised panic attacks in front of a bunch of people I barely know. Even those that are more sensitive to the reality of things like depression and anxiety aren't always perfect, because its hard to understand mental illness and ND if you don't experience it. I don't really blame people for that, it's just a failure of imagination, but it does fucking suck.
Anyway, all the best in your struggle against internalised ableism. I know I feel it too.
As someone diagnosed with Depression, Anxiety, ADHD, and OCD, its the ADHD that is least accepted by society, but its really subtle. ADHD is basically being wired to do the opposite of what capitalism asks of the working class, and at the same time is considered to just be "can't sit still or minor problems paying attention." so no one really cares to accommodate or help you so it feels like being forced into a society designed to antagonize you.
