What makes something a disability? Can mental illness be a disability? If your disability is being treated, and doesn’t currently disable you, are you still disabled? Are you still disabled even when your disability goes from being primarily visible, to primarily invisible? If you were in Special Education as a kid, but have made Dean’s List the last 3 semesters, are you still able to call yourself disabled? Do you say you are disabled? Do you say you were disabled? Do you count your issues as a disability at all? Is that undermining the plights of actually disabled people?
Last year I was in a math class, and two girls sitting next to me got to talking about the fact they were both people who grew up disabled with chronic illness conditions. I couldn’t help but overhear them, and as they talked I realized I related to everything they said. From not being believed by doctors, to getting denied accommodations in school, to missing out on formative experiences due to disability and trying treatment after treatment with little to no results. But as much as I wanted to join in and say “me too” I couldn’t. I didn’t know how they would respond.
As someone with severe anxiety and panic attacks, I’ve always felt like I straddle the line between mental illness and disability. People don’t like to consider mental illness a disability. Even in writing this anonymously, part of me is scared that I will get criticized for calling it that at all. I feel this need to go out of my way to justify that my experiences were bad enough to get the label of disability, to put my heart and trauma out on the table so that no one thinks I am trying to claim a label that doesn’t apply to me. But that’s exactly the problem.
I don’t want to have to explain the fact that I was a completely non-functional child, a total mess. It’s no one’s business that I had daily severe panic attacks that would last for hours, complete with kicking, screaming, and endless sobbing. It isn’t fun to recount the fact that multiple therapists told my parents that my issues were too severe for them to treat. I don’t want to have to explain the years I spent in Special Education classes in order to participate in a conversation about disability.
I am not the gatekeeper of disability. I don’t know what counts and what doesn’t. But in my opinion, while not all mental illnesses are disabling, some of them are, and I see no reason for that to be any less valid than any other kind of disability. Maybe there is no one firm guide to disability, maybe it’s more fluid and complicated than that binary allows.
Unruly Bodies 
Thank you for putting yourself out there and sharing your personal experience. When it comes to disability is there a defining line? How can we deem someone disabled and give them accommodations. From your experience I would see your anxiety and panic attacks as disabling, because of things you could not participate in due to your medical condition. I feel like a real defining point for you would have been therapists saying they could not treat you. When it comes to disability and labeling who is disabled and who is not is just another way to exclude people from society, which we see a lot of today. I really liked you bringing attention to the idea of questioning if you are still disabled if you had special accommodations in elementary school, but now in college you are dean’s list. That brings me back to the question of, is there a defining line and certain standards that must be met to be considered disabled.