I can see where each of you is coming from. I suppose the lesson is that the person ought to be the one deciding how much their identity is bound up with their condition? For example, many people develop mental illness later in life, so it feels more like an acute affliction rather than something they were born with.
To be clear I wasn’t calling autism a mental illness, although reading back it’s a little confusing due to the wording. The dialogue above was between one person who is autistic and another person who has a mental illness, both which I categorized as conditions (I suppose if we’re splitting hairs maybe this word could be problematic, but I think you get my point) which one may identify with to a greater or lesser extent (“being” versus “having”).
In the above discussion it is apparent that there is no universally correct attitude to have for everyone, i.e. it’s not correct to assume that every autistic person wants to identify with their autism the way @autismdragon@hexbear.net does, so my point was to give space for that person to decide, rather than for others to decide for them whether they “are” autistic or they “have” autism. Otherwise you run the risk of either belittling the person by identifying them with their condition when they feel separate from it, or belittling their experience by implying the real person is being suppressed by a condition which that person in fact strongly identifies with.
I don’t have a mental illness, I have a physical illness that causes me a lot of pain. I think the confusion here is partly my fault for not saying so at the outset.
I clearly have weird hang ups about it all. I can’t pretend I’m “right” to cringe at spoonies but they do make me uncomfy for the reasons I tried to outlined.
