Mental Disability Writing: Understanding and Dealing with a Mental Challenge by Writing about It

Writing with a mental disability—like writing with learning disabilities—is a
challenge. Hell, just having a mental disorder is challenge enough.

Mental disability writing is a challenge we fight, face, confront, deal with, and learn to compensate for in school, at home, and everywhere else we need writing tasks done.

An even greater task is getting others to understand. So I dedicate this post to all of us with challenges (now also called psychiatric disabilities): we will now add the challenge of coming up with a metaphor or two that will help in the furthering of our/their understanding.

And what I trust we will find is that we may be mental, but we are also terribly gifted.

How Do You Describe Your Mental Disability?
What Do You Compare it to?

Try to go to church with Tourette's.
Try to build a website with ADD.
Try to fly a plane with OCD.

To do simple, common tasks with a psychiatric disorder is to be head colorist on a cartoon team at Disney Studios when you're color blind. The simple becomes complex. The intriguing becomes appalling. Creativity turns into a demand. Play turns into work.

Slamming rain on a shield with crappy wipers. This is representative of one of the metaphors for ADD. The brilliant E. M. Hallowell, M.D., writes in “What’s It Like to Have ADD?” that having this mental disorder is like
“driving in the rain with bad windshield wipers.” He and others have used such metaphors, analogies, and similes to define ADD in concrete terms:

It's “like listening to a radio station with a lot of static…” (Hallowell, 1992, p.1).

It's “like trying to build a house of cards in a dust storm” (p.1).

“For…adults with ADD, life is directed by a hapless stagehand who alters the set so often that it’s hard to know where anything is or where it should be” (Talan, 2002, p.18).
Being an ADDer is being a "dynamic and exciting” Porsche that races about in a world of Toyotas (Kelly and Mundo, 1993, pp.124-46).

My descriptions of ADD are in an essay titled "in this skin...," which I may post here in its entirety if I don’t expand it into a book. In the meantime, think about your own definitions and descriptions. What would you compare your mental “disorder” to? What characteristics of the concrete can you apply to the abstract?

If you have bipolar disorder, do you feel like a MIG fighter plane tethered to the earth by a giant rubber band? If you have OCD, do you see yourself as a sailor bailing with a teaspoon?

Try a list of details that match your symptoms.
Try conveying with sights, sounds, acts, smells.
Try for funny...by exaggerating.

If you get stuck, try reading a book or other piece of disability writing about and/or by a person with your particular disorder or mental disability; or contact me if you wish. We can check out the work(s) together.

Coming soon: sarcastic, sardonic scoffing and self-indulgent sulking .... Bet you can't wait!

Works Cited

Hallowell, Edward M., M.D.. “What’s it Like to Have ADD?” National ADDA. 1992. add.org. 1 March 2000. hallowell/htm.

Kelly, Kate, and Peggy Mundo. You Mean I’m Not Lazy Stupid or Crazy? New York: Fireside Books, 1993.

Talan, Jamie. “ADD and Your Brain: Why We Forget to do Stuff.” ADDitude Magazine. Jul/Aug 2002: 17-18+.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:

The posts of MindFeelds do not promote, sell, or have any professional connections with any psychiatric institution or services. I am not a trained therapist, psychologist, or psychiatrist, and I do not purport to diagnose, advise or prescribe. I am trained and experienced in writing and in teaching college writers, I promote writing with disabilities and disability writing, and encourage creativity and art as it relates to our thinking, emotive, social, and creative writing challenges and writing about those challenges. The only psychiatric experience I have is my own.