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It’s time for another post on fiction and disability. Oh goody, I know you’re all really excited, but oh this trope! This trope hits close to home for me, because I am sickly, I am neurotic, and I’m a geek, and it was easy for people, as I grew up to slot me into this stereotype and disregard me accordingly. So this is a story of how the storytelling tropes we use hurt real people.
The first time I was aware of this trope, I was ten. I had only just woken up from the fog the neurological effects of my until then untreated immune disease had kept me in since birth, and I was watching some stupid Disney Channel kids’ show (Even Stevens for anyone interested) and there was a guest character who was portrayed as a health-obsessed hypochondriac with not-real allergies and asthma, and encouraged the audience to laugh at him for this. I was furious, so furious that I got my mother to rant on the phone about it to some poor beleaguered soul at Disney. At this point, I’d already had to deal with everybody from students, to teachers, to friends’ parents refusing to believe my illness was real and putting me in danger or calling my parents and me liars to our face. I didn’t realize it yet, but the annoying, demanding hypochondriac who pretends to have allergies is a stock figure of mockery.
This trope is an example of a phenomenon called ableism, which is the prejudice against people with disabilities. Also called disableism, especially in the UK, ableism includes a set of common beliefs held consciously or not, that people with disabilities should act a certain way, or that people with disabilities are somehow worth less than the able-bodied, or are somehow to blame for their own condition, or are leaching off society, or any number of other attitudes about people with disabilities that are false and damaging to the people who face them. I’ve written about a lot of this before, but what I haven’t talked about is the specific type of ableism experienced by people when they are unable to convince the people around them that their disability is real and legitimate. This trope exemplifies those attitudes. Because I am geeky, and anxious, and because my illness is autoimmune based and includes allergies, people who have been seeing this trope play out in popular media since they were children assume that I am faking my debilitating, terrifying, and occasionally life-threatening illness. They feel justified in denying me services and accommodations that I need and am legally entitled to, in mocking me for something I can’t help, and even to try to “test” me by committing forms of assault like exposing me without my knowledge to substances that could trigger a seizure, an asthma attack, or other unpleasant allergic response, because obviously I’m not really sick.
To make this trope especially painful to me, my geekiness, mental health issues, and illness are related, and part of the reason they are is ableism itself. First society made me fit a stereotype, and they it derided me for it. The idea behind the trope is that the geeky neurosis causes the “sickliness”, whereas for me, it was the other way around. There are two ways my illness led to my mental health issues, directly, and indirectly through the responses of people around me. By far the less important of these is the direct version. For a person with an illness like mine, where exposure to ordinary innocuous, common substances can cause severe injury or death, avoiding those substances is critical, and the mental effort spent avoiding such substances becomes habitual, and lends itself to developing OCD. Also, being at risk and unable to fully control that risk, leads to a certain level of perfectly reasonable anxiety, but our bodies and brains become used to that, and the anxiety can bleed over into non-illness related areas.
A much bigger part of the way my illness led to my mental health issues is the way everyone around me treated me because of my illness. Keep in mind, I grew up in a town particularly cruel to people who did not fit what they saw as normal. I was blamed for my disability, as were my parents. My first memories were of extreme brutality at the hands of my peers. You see, my seizures are frightening not only for me, but for the people around me, and because I don’t fall down, but instead run and hide, and attack anyone who tries to stop me from doing that, a lot of the adults insisted that they were behavioral problems, and not a medical condition. When I got treatment, and stopped having seizures every day, the kids around me felt like they had to prove they weren’t afraid of me anymore by taunting me and beating me up, and some of my teachers encouraged this. Parents didn’t want me around their children, and I was made to feel ashamed of being sick. The constant bullying led to me switching schools, where I met my first stalker. The reputation I had for being a liar or delusional, as well as my desperate need for approval after being tormented for so long, made me her perfect victim. After I moved and was able to get away from her, ableist attitudes contributed to my vulnerability to a second stalker. It shouldn’t surprise anybody that I’m anxious, and I have trust issues and difficulty interacting with people. My illness and ableism are also a large part of why I’m a geek. Because I had no friends, I took refuge in Fantasy novels. I doubt I would love them as deeply as I do if I hadn’t been so badly bullied.
The fact that this trope is especially prevalent in media aimed at children means that kids learn early to view people like e this way early, and children with disabilities learn that society will never treat them as quite as valuable as their able-bodied peers.
Sadly, this isn’t just a problem for flat characters, or even unlikable ones. One of my favorite characters, Mozzie, from White Collar, has definite shades of this. Although he is well developed, complex, and easy to identify with even at his most morally ambiguous, he is also a high strung geek whose allergies are treated by the writers as a personal eccentricity instead of an illness. Mind, I have a theory that he’s faking at least some of his most out there behaviors, including his hypochondria, but that takes him into the arms of several other kinds of unfortunate implications, which I hope to write about eventually.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that this trope was cooked up by a conspiracy of people who hate people with disabilities and what to make us all thoroughly miserable. That’s not how these things work. This trope in particular most likely has its origins in the self depreciating humor of Jewish comedians who really didn’t mean to say anything about physical disability at all. For me, this means some of the crap I face is due to latent anti-Semitism, especially where I live now, where anti-Semitism is fairly prevalent. Oh come on, we know how many Jews are hypochondriacs, she’s Jewish, that must be what’s really going on. Of course this goes through very few people’s heads consciously, but the closer a person comes to looking like a stereotype, the harder it is for them to convince others that they really don’t fit it.
Very subtly, this trope says that someone can’t have both a mental illness and a physical disability. If someone has a mental illness, not only do they have to deal with the other sets of prejudice society throws at them for being mentally ill, but their physical disability is immediately assumed to be all in their head (unless they’re missing limbs or something unavoidably obvious... I hope). It’s not like you ever see a tough guy character, a grizzled cop, or a martial arts master, or even a sexy woman with allergies. This trope says that if I were less of a geek, I could lose the oxygen concentrator, the mask, the shots, the endless work, the complex diet, and be just fine, and I’m just being silly not to, that I’m just too weak.
This trope drives salt into many many wounds. It contributes to the way people treat me and people like me, but it also just hurts to know that the closest people like me ever get to being represented in media is as caricatures and objects of ridicule. I am sick of it. I’m beyond sick of it, even if it’s just one more insult in a long line of insults people with disabilities face every day.
There is nothing wrong with writing characters who have disabilities including allergies and asthma who have issues with anxiety or other mental health difficulties, and who have geeky interests. In fact, in one of my planned novels, the main character shares my illness, and has plenty of reasons to be neurotic (I havent decided whether or not he will have geeky interests, but it’s a strong possibility) and personally, I would love to see these kinds of characters done well by anyone (a moratorium on hypochondria-based fake allergies and asthma would be nice, however). Just everybody, think about the tropes you’re using.
The first time I was aware of this trope, I was ten. I had only just woken up from the fog the neurological effects of my until then untreated immune disease had kept me in since birth, and I was watching some stupid Disney Channel kids’ show (Even Stevens for anyone interested) and there was a guest character who was portrayed as a health-obsessed hypochondriac with not-real allergies and asthma, and encouraged the audience to laugh at him for this. I was furious, so furious that I got my mother to rant on the phone about it to some poor beleaguered soul at Disney. At this point, I’d already had to deal with everybody from students, to teachers, to friends’ parents refusing to believe my illness was real and putting me in danger or calling my parents and me liars to our face. I didn’t realize it yet, but the annoying, demanding hypochondriac who pretends to have allergies is a stock figure of mockery.
This trope is an example of a phenomenon called ableism, which is the prejudice against people with disabilities. Also called disableism, especially in the UK, ableism includes a set of common beliefs held consciously or not, that people with disabilities should act a certain way, or that people with disabilities are somehow worth less than the able-bodied, or are somehow to blame for their own condition, or are leaching off society, or any number of other attitudes about people with disabilities that are false and damaging to the people who face them. I’ve written about a lot of this before, but what I haven’t talked about is the specific type of ableism experienced by people when they are unable to convince the people around them that their disability is real and legitimate. This trope exemplifies those attitudes. Because I am geeky, and anxious, and because my illness is autoimmune based and includes allergies, people who have been seeing this trope play out in popular media since they were children assume that I am faking my debilitating, terrifying, and occasionally life-threatening illness. They feel justified in denying me services and accommodations that I need and am legally entitled to, in mocking me for something I can’t help, and even to try to “test” me by committing forms of assault like exposing me without my knowledge to substances that could trigger a seizure, an asthma attack, or other unpleasant allergic response, because obviously I’m not really sick.
To make this trope especially painful to me, my geekiness, mental health issues, and illness are related, and part of the reason they are is ableism itself. First society made me fit a stereotype, and they it derided me for it. The idea behind the trope is that the geeky neurosis causes the “sickliness”, whereas for me, it was the other way around. There are two ways my illness led to my mental health issues, directly, and indirectly through the responses of people around me. By far the less important of these is the direct version. For a person with an illness like mine, where exposure to ordinary innocuous, common substances can cause severe injury or death, avoiding those substances is critical, and the mental effort spent avoiding such substances becomes habitual, and lends itself to developing OCD. Also, being at risk and unable to fully control that risk, leads to a certain level of perfectly reasonable anxiety, but our bodies and brains become used to that, and the anxiety can bleed over into non-illness related areas.
A much bigger part of the way my illness led to my mental health issues is the way everyone around me treated me because of my illness. Keep in mind, I grew up in a town particularly cruel to people who did not fit what they saw as normal. I was blamed for my disability, as were my parents. My first memories were of extreme brutality at the hands of my peers. You see, my seizures are frightening not only for me, but for the people around me, and because I don’t fall down, but instead run and hide, and attack anyone who tries to stop me from doing that, a lot of the adults insisted that they were behavioral problems, and not a medical condition. When I got treatment, and stopped having seizures every day, the kids around me felt like they had to prove they weren’t afraid of me anymore by taunting me and beating me up, and some of my teachers encouraged this. Parents didn’t want me around their children, and I was made to feel ashamed of being sick. The constant bullying led to me switching schools, where I met my first stalker. The reputation I had for being a liar or delusional, as well as my desperate need for approval after being tormented for so long, made me her perfect victim. After I moved and was able to get away from her, ableist attitudes contributed to my vulnerability to a second stalker. It shouldn’t surprise anybody that I’m anxious, and I have trust issues and difficulty interacting with people. My illness and ableism are also a large part of why I’m a geek. Because I had no friends, I took refuge in Fantasy novels. I doubt I would love them as deeply as I do if I hadn’t been so badly bullied.
The fact that this trope is especially prevalent in media aimed at children means that kids learn early to view people like e this way early, and children with disabilities learn that society will never treat them as quite as valuable as their able-bodied peers.
Sadly, this isn’t just a problem for flat characters, or even unlikable ones. One of my favorite characters, Mozzie, from White Collar, has definite shades of this. Although he is well developed, complex, and easy to identify with even at his most morally ambiguous, he is also a high strung geek whose allergies are treated by the writers as a personal eccentricity instead of an illness. Mind, I have a theory that he’s faking at least some of his most out there behaviors, including his hypochondria, but that takes him into the arms of several other kinds of unfortunate implications, which I hope to write about eventually.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that this trope was cooked up by a conspiracy of people who hate people with disabilities and what to make us all thoroughly miserable. That’s not how these things work. This trope in particular most likely has its origins in the self depreciating humor of Jewish comedians who really didn’t mean to say anything about physical disability at all. For me, this means some of the crap I face is due to latent anti-Semitism, especially where I live now, where anti-Semitism is fairly prevalent. Oh come on, we know how many Jews are hypochondriacs, she’s Jewish, that must be what’s really going on. Of course this goes through very few people’s heads consciously, but the closer a person comes to looking like a stereotype, the harder it is for them to convince others that they really don’t fit it.
Very subtly, this trope says that someone can’t have both a mental illness and a physical disability. If someone has a mental illness, not only do they have to deal with the other sets of prejudice society throws at them for being mentally ill, but their physical disability is immediately assumed to be all in their head (unless they’re missing limbs or something unavoidably obvious... I hope). It’s not like you ever see a tough guy character, a grizzled cop, or a martial arts master, or even a sexy woman with allergies. This trope says that if I were less of a geek, I could lose the oxygen concentrator, the mask, the shots, the endless work, the complex diet, and be just fine, and I’m just being silly not to, that I’m just too weak.
This trope drives salt into many many wounds. It contributes to the way people treat me and people like me, but it also just hurts to know that the closest people like me ever get to being represented in media is as caricatures and objects of ridicule. I am sick of it. I’m beyond sick of it, even if it’s just one more insult in a long line of insults people with disabilities face every day.
There is nothing wrong with writing characters who have disabilities including allergies and asthma who have issues with anxiety or other mental health difficulties, and who have geeky interests. In fact, in one of my planned novels, the main character shares my illness, and has plenty of reasons to be neurotic (I havent decided whether or not he will have geeky interests, but it’s a strong possibility) and personally, I would love to see these kinds of characters done well by anyone (a moratorium on hypochondria-based fake allergies and asthma would be nice, however). Just everybody, think about the tropes you’re using.
