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Friday, December 23, 2016













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  1. I think it is a disability under the social model of a disability being the inability to do something (or do it as well, or as reliably) that society generally expects people to be able to do. It's a circular reasoning, but I think it works here.

    By the way, "functional" isn't generally used to imply reversible in my experience. It is used to imply real symptoms for which a more specific cause in the body can't be found. So abdominal pain from an ulcer or constipation or celiac disease is considered "organic." Abdominal pain which does not relate to an identifiable problem in an organ is often called "functional." Which does have "All in head" connotations but not necessarily reversible ones. I am suspecting at some point we are going to find that a lot of people with "functional" pain have differences in nerve endings or neurotransmitter levels or other differences in pain sensation from typical that we cannot currently measure. But also, one thing I tell people is that pain from anxiety, for example, is still pain. It still hurts. It isn't someone pretending to hurt to get out of things (this is a thing too but a pretty rare one.) It's just that some interaction between the anxiety and the body causes the pain, and that treatment strategies have to acknowledge that.

  2. I honk that (maybe?) I'm also a non-visualizer. I guess it's just so hard to determine, since my mind has always been the way it is. I don't ever actually "see" anything in my head, but I can get a sense of an object or person. The one thing most other people seem to easily be able to do is call up images of other people in their mind. I can't do that, not even of my own reflection. But I still recognize people just fine. What I can't do--and have always had a hard time understanding how anyone else was able to do--is describe a face for a sketch artist. I could give an artist some general directions about eye color, maybe if a face was found or long, or facial hair descriptions, but that would be about it. And if someone presented me with a bunch of lip options, I'm not sure I'd be able to do anything with that either. I can't make any sense of the phrase "I'm starting to forget what they look like." Does this sound like aphantasia?

