ABSTRACT
Who am I talking about? So far I’ve used a variety of terms to denote impairments of the mind, and I haven’t yet exhausted the list. Contemporary language available includes psychiatric disability, mental illness, cognitive disability, intellectual
disability,mental health service user (or consumer), neurodiversity, neuroatypical, psychiatric system survivor, crazy, and mad. ‘‘No term in the history of madness is neutral,’’ Geoffrey Reaume argues, ‘‘not mental illness, madness, or any other term’’ (182). Moreover, as Ian Hacking has pointed out,
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particular names may thrive in a particular ‘‘ecological niche’’—for instance, the intersectionof thediagnosis ‘‘neurasthenia’’with nineteenth-century French stories of the ‘‘Wandering Jew’’ (2, 120) or the diagnosis ‘‘drapetomania,’’ applied to African American slaves who attempted to escape (Jackson 4). Keeping this dynamism inmind, the following analysis does not aim to accept some terms and discard others. Rather, I want to clarify the different areas they map and show that each does particular kinds of cultural work in particular contexts. Although I usemental disability as my own term of choice, I continue to use others as needed, and my overall argument is for deployment of language in a way that operates as inclusively as possible, inviting coalition,while alsoattending to the specific texture of individual experiences. In doing so, I follow the urging of Tanya Titchkosky, who argues that the aim of analyzing language about disability should not be to mandate particular terms but rather ‘‘to examine what our current articulations of disability are saying in the here and now’’ (‘‘Disability’’ 138). The problem of naming has always preoccupied DS scholars,1 but acquires a particular urgency when considered in the context of disabilities of the mind, for often the very terms used to name persons with mental disabilities have explicitly foreclosed our status as persons. Aristotle’s famous declaration that man is a rational animal (1253a; 1098a) gave rise to centuries of insistence that to be named mad was to lose one’s personhood. Mad is a term generally used in non-U.S.
