I work for a community service center under the state department of health and I would like to share some information that I’ve learned over the past couple of months. I’ve been meeting with an older adult, let’s call her Doris, for 3 days a week for months and we’ve become friends. Doris is single and lives with her younger adult sister and sisters’ partner. Doris doesn’t do much during the day but has a strict eating schedule, refrains from sugar, and gets dehydrated easily. During our meetings we do crafts, stretches, online games, and talk about our day. Honestly, I love Doris so much and the time we spend together. 

It was such an interesting experience getting to know her. She has a mental disability and from what I’ve witnessed, she doesn’t know how to read, or write, can’t pronounce words correctly, constantly repeats herself, asks the same questions over and over again, has some deformities in her body, and gets easily distracted and angry. But the more I got to know Doris, I also witnessed that she is possibly the sweetest and most understanding person ever. She constantly checks up on me and remembers a lot of information that she brings up to get updates on. She tells me about her worries and I reassure her. The difficult moments that she faces are very unique and I have to be a good listener and role model so that I can give her good advice. So after getting to know how Doris operates, I started mentally prepping before our meetings; maintaining a positive attitude, assure that everything is and will be fine, and focusing on making her happy regardless of what she might say to me.

After reading Margaret Price’s “Defining Mental Disability”, I tried to relate what I’ve learned to how Doris might think. I know she knows that she is different because she has explicitly mentioned that to me. But when she expresses wishes to me that another able-bodied and/or mentally-able person experiences daily, such as having a partner or getting boba tea, I struggle to try to explain to her why she would not get the same chances. Doris draws like a first-grader and her favorite games have to do with Clifford the Big Red Dog and Barney. The fridge and pantry in Doris’s house have to be locked because she will try to eat the food and she has broken the lock multiple times. She has eaten dog food because she felt the urge to throw objects, like the laptop, around when she gets a tantrum. She also picks at her finger and scars it. I don’t mean to put Doris’s business out like this but I want people to know just how different people can be and how accepting we must learn to be. Knowing Doris can be such an eye-opener, as it was for me because I have never met or heard of someone like her. “No term in the history of madness is neu­tral,” Geoffrey Reaume states. So Doris might be different to you and me, but elsewhere she is neutral. Although she needs help and stability, it is not okay to look down on her or anybody else. Price also mentions that she battled her insurance CIGNA to continue getting coverage for her mental health and it had to be determined by her healthcare professionals. It is so absurd to me that patient-centered care is not the focus in America. The patient’s wellness and that everchanging journey should be accounted for the most. The “well/unwell” paradigm is not linear but rather a spectrum. We can not throw around the word “normal” because what even is “normal”? To Doris, we may not be “normal”. We all make up these terms and conditions in our heads and spread them in society to get accepted but doing so means we marginalize people, humans, sisters, and brothers, that deep down are no different than us.