"People with invisible disabilities, such as chronic pain or some sleep disorder, are often accused of faking or imagining their disabilities. These symptoms can occur due to chronic illness, chronic pain, injury, birth disorders, etc., and are not always obvious to the onlooker.
Invisible Disabilities are certain kinds of disabilities that are not immediately apparent to others. It is estimated that 10% of people in the U.S. have a medical condition that could be considered a type of invisible disability.
Nearly one in two people in the U.S. has a chronic medical condition of one kind or another. Still, most people are not considered disabled, as their medical conditions do not impair their normal activities. These people do not use an assistive device, and most look and act perfectly healthy.
Hundreds of conditions, illnesses, and injuries can result in a hidden disability - anemia, brain injuries and strokes, allergies, epilepsy, heart diseases, lung conditions, mental illnesses, and chronic pain are just a few examples. Yet, although we are all aware of these individual conditions, there is much to be learned about the shared needs and experiences of the hidden disability community as the unique group it is."
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Taken from the Invisible Disabilities: List and General Information by Disabled World (DW), 29/01/2026
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Link to Disabled World’s (DW) collection of articles, research papers, and documents focused on various aspects of invisible disabilities
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As always, we ask that in order to participate in the weekly megathread, one self-identifies as some form of disabled, which is broadly defined in the community sidebar:
“Disability” is an umbrella term which encompasses physical disabilities, emotional/psychiatric disabilities, neurodivergence, intellectual/developmental disabilities, sensory disabilities, invisible disabilities, and more. You do not have to have an official diagnosis to consider yourself disabled.
Mask up, love one another, and stay alive for one more week.
Post-Musk SSI reevaluations are a nightmare.
I chipped three teeth from stimming in the last 6 months. Got the news the other day at the dentist.
I haven’t been around the past week as I’ve been in hospital with a severe ear infection that I couldn’t fight off due to being allergic to virtually every antibiotic now. It was a big, horrible thing and I just got home this afternoon. Anyway, hope you’re all doing OK.
Doctor agreed I can stop therapy, and gave me resources to find something else that’s free. And I noticed they have a program for ppl with mild to moderate depression but do not have anything for ppl with severe depression?
Tbh that’s fine I guess I’d rather play Minecraft for an extra hour than deal with more free mental health services anyway
they don’t have a treatment for us because they can’t prescribe a community that gives a shit about you or a society that doesn’t want us to die to fill the pockets of some leech.
Even in a society where a leech’s pocket aren’t being filled by our death, we just aren’t considered worth saving. There scientists trying to make vaccines for pregnant folks that would ‘reduce chances of autism and depression in fetus’ like they would rather spend tons of money to mess with two parts of life we barely understand (birth and brain) in a hubris rivalled by Dr. Frankenstein instead of just letting us live, like seriously if you don’t want to accomodate is, at least let us live on our own terms? Maybe support assisted suicide as an option?
support assisted suicide as an option?
As someone who has wanted assisted suicide for many years, I truly don’t understand why this isn’t an option in every capitalist country for disabled people who aren’t terminal. IME, they do everything they can to avoid supporting us - I would have starved or committed suicide if it wasn’t for mutual aid, they literally left me without a source of income for like a year and a half. They complain non-stop about how much I cost the NHS and have tried to change my prescriptions to cheaper ones that don’t work just to save money. I can’t get the help I need like a carer from the council because too many people need this assistance so they’re only giving it to people who are bedridden or have special needs. I can’t even wear a bra any more because my mobility is too bad to get one on and they won’t provide someone to help me dress. I can only wear baggy or stetch clothes, without buttons or zips and I can hardly get those clothes on without help anyway. The food bank only lets you have 9 days worth of food every 6 months. I mean, why are they forcing me to stay alive when they clearly don’t give a shit about my welfare? It’s just infuriating. I can only assume that they want to think well of themselves, and if they outright say “Yes let’s put the disabled down,” they’d have to admit they are Nazis. Easier to claim there is so much help out there and if we aren’t accessing it, it’s our own fault. And this mentality is so prevalent that it is even in evidence here on mutual aid often, with all the unsolicited advice people receive, with information about how to access help without needing to use mutual aid. Except the advice they give is usually wrong, not applicable to the situation or inaccessible to the person asking for help.
There are people who are genuine comrades but their rhetoric on disabled people is one step removed from Nazism. Listen to any doctor or medical who is a communist or any communist period, their rhetoric when boiled down to basics is “You will our way and you will like it because we don’t want to admit our thinking about you is influenced from people we hate” if they say “yea you can die” then it’ll be clear they don’t want to help anyone, they can’t just give help and a dignified death to those of us who want it.
I’ve been considering doing an occasional ‘disability spotlight’ kind of thing for future mega topics, with the idea of being able to bring awareness to different disabilities. Problem is, I have but a drop of knowledge in the ocean of disabilities, and limited spoons, so I would need some help from the community to make this happen. Would anyone here like to see something specific featured as an upcoming mega, or even be interested in doing a blurb write-up for a mega and having it pasted in the post? I’d love to hear ya’lls thoughts on it.
I’m not feeling too good right now but later I might be interested, especially in writing something about how society creates even more difficulties for us than we already have.
If you’re up for it, that would be great. Hope you feel better soon and can catch up on some rest.
Thank you.
Auto-immune disorders would be quite nice since they’re very much invisible and their symptoms manifest as what able-bodied people consider laziness.
This is a great topic to explore, thank you.
I want some ice cream… I am not asking for any for some reason but I really really really want some. Chocolate, strawberry, mango, butterscotch, pistachio, almonds, saffron, cookies and creme… I really want some
I’m afraid if anyone found out how bad my mental state was right now they’d take me to the hospital. I’m so fucking scared. Having to walk that line of underselling enough to not get hospitalized but saying enough to hopefully get something fixed. But I don’t know if it’s even fixable. My brain is so broken, and the only ones I can tell about it are internet friends who are still, in many ways, strangers; and I can only tell y’all because you aren’t able to call the cops on me.
Yea this sucks so bad. It causes my brain to view therapy as adversarial in nature and naturally that means I can’t bring myself to engage properly
And you can’t call help hotlines bc the person on the other end can and will call the cops on you (has happened to me)
Try to treat the mentally ill as people challenge (impossible)
My best mechanism to help with my mental health has been crying, crying really does break something out of you. It is an act that breaks the numbness, an extreme emotional reaction that is profoundly living, only living things, humans and non-human animals can cry, I practiced and have almost perfected silent crying where I let tears fall without the scream and they really help with my mental health.
I can try that. I find it hard to cry, but maybe I can practice that.
I understand that very well
I hope you can get the help you need soon. And I want you to know even if I knew you personally, I would never call the cops on you. Nobody deserves the treatment they deal out.
Take care sweetie, I believe in you
Yeah. I’ve only dealt with the cops once really, and it was a piglet campus security person who was called in when the counsellor needed someone to take me to the hospital. He was mostly chill, he didn’t handcuff me and he let me ride in the front passenger seat. All-in-all it wasn’t the worst experience (and I know some people have had really bad, even fatal experiences) but yeh.
I’m glad you got that lucky with the campus piglet. And to mirror what Letztertod wrote, finding emotional outlets when you’re overwhelmed can really help a lot. Crying, but also screaming, intense laughing and maybe even hitting a punching bag can help a lot with emotional regulation. Look for what seems the most feasible to you.
More and more symptoms are breaking through my anti-psychotics, and I’m afraid I’m about to enter Psychosis Era Part II. Seeing how I didn’t do very well with Part I, I’m really nervous.
Should definitely speak to whomever prescribes your meds as soon as possible. Perhaps a dosage adjustment will be able to assist in what’s occurring?
I have been talking to them. I’ve tried pretty much every drug under the sun, and this eventually happened every time. I’m at the highest dose of what I’m currently on. Last time she just adjusted my anxiety med dose to try and help reduce anxiety caused by the other symptoms.
Getting diagnoses for invisible illnesses feels so impossible.
Accessing medication is such a nightmare. I have to get all my stuff shipped from India, and I’m not nearly savvy enough to find or coordinate with Chinese suppliers.
Doctors here are so painfully out of date They won’t prescribe any modern drugs.
What’s the issue? The doctors pretending your disease is made up? They wanna prescribe you cocaine for your blood ghosts?
They’ve managed to turn medication into a gambling racket that favors the ruling class
Inshallah there emerges a Temu for generics.
Xi Jinping I am begging you.
Also people complain abut ai posters for small businesses. But i’m surrounded by information posters made by ai. Wash your alternatively 4, 5 and 6 lingered hands before seeing patients! Patient violence by weird ghibli-pixar hybrids who are sort of melting into the bed is unacceptable! Respect your fellow piss filtered workers! Here’s how evaluate a fracture of an anatomically impossible leg! (LENGTH, AXIS, ROTATION. 3 DATA POINTS. WHY THE AI?!?)
That feels worse. Like not to pull rank or anything, but your local restaurant having an ai generated cat on its menu just doesn’t seem dangerous, this kinda does.
That stuff is more geared towards normalisation however information is far more insidious because of misinformation about important things.
A child exempted me from their “All adults are evil” rule.
Because “[i am] not a real adult, [I’m] just cringe”.
Kids man, brutal.
I don’t think you’re cringe, I think you’re the best sandwichmaker! And that makes you exempt from “real adults”
I take being called cringe rather than evil as a pure upgrade. Obviously if I had given the child my lunch sandwich they would have bumped me up from cringe to “Almost cool”
I think you’re already cool for taking this with a lot of humor
What advice ro you have for me?
I’m watching around 50 lychee seeds sprout and grow. Thanks to my bf some of them are potted. Today we just learned that sprouting lychee from seed is often going to result in sour fruit. And that the best way to get trees that bear sweet lychees is to clone a tree that already produces sweet fruit. To me, it kinda sounds like the way apples and the seed sprouts work.
Idk what we’re gonna do with all these plants. We have no land. Just a balcony. We hope at least one of them will bear sweet fruit.
Can you get an allotment?
I have none in walking distance and I don’t want to produce more fumes than the trees absorb via car. I think the closest to having them planted as I can get is giving them away as ornamental plants, with the slightest chance of them producing sweet fruit in 4+ years.
50 is a lot, maybe you could connect with some fellow plant lovers who would have the space and means to take some off your hands?
Started archiving my journals going back to ~2016 yesterday, and I was amazed to see that I was basically never able bodied.
Even a decade ago before I had any idea about chronic pain and before it really started, I was complaining constantly of poor sleep, being exhausted and falling ill basically every winter. Looking back at it, I’m not surprised that working a blue-collar labour job for six years wore on me to the point I couldn’t anymore. I guess I’m glad I kept the journal, even though it records some of the worst periods of my life, lmao.
Nearly a decade of records is pretty impressive, it’s wild what we can put our bodies through
I guess I should be thankful that my body survived the daily torment I put it through for so long
Conversations I’ve participated in (I won’t reveal which one I am)
Person #1 is exasperated because their patient “Came to me with a headache and I find out the only liquid they drink is a can of monster a day”, Person #2 responds “Yeah, that’s an underdose. Subtherapeutic” and a #3 says “Yeah you should get 2 litres of liquid a day at least, and that’s what 4 cans?”. #2 “4 cans? 5 at least, there’s osmotic pressure to consider.”
Meanwhile #1 is sitting with their face in their hands, reconsidering their life choices.Can I guess which one you are? Either #1 or #2
deep dark secrets
Sadly, I have to admit that I am #3. I was neither the clever or the kind one this time.
Did anyone see The Lost King about the search for Richard iii? There’s a bit at the end where someone from the University of Leicester says that the fact that Richard was shown to have scoliosis shows that he really was evil - ie Shakespeare was right about him having a hunchback (even though the scoliosis would not have caused a hunchback) so he must have been right about everything else. Someone else argues “So twisted spine equals twisted personality??”
I found this webpage discussing how Richard iii was made into a disabled stereotype, and how disabled people in general have been seen as cunning and deceitful, which is even true in the modern era. After all anyone who has applied for disability benefits knows you are treated as a scammer who is faking your disability. I just thought it was interesting:
https://www.3da.org/post/richard-iii-shakespeare-and-the-making-of-a-disabled-stereotype
That is interesting, and an interesting read. It’s definitely still portrayed and perpetuated in media in the worst way, which just piles on to how people learn to view disabilities.
It seems like the media is constantly trying to portray us as awful and it’s clearly been going on for hundreds of years. I’ve started thinking it’s some evolutionary thing, the healthy trying to get rid of the weak so we don’t drag them down.
