The Hierarchy of Disability

This is the transcript of my YouTube video "The Hierarchy of Disability".

Society is filled with hierarchies and usually these hierarchies help to provide some kind of structure to help smooth the working of the various organisations that make up the fabric of human existence – workplaces, armed services, political institutions and even families have a type of hierarchical structure.  Unfortunately, new pernicious hierarchies have been created that have nothing to do with any form of useful structural context for society and are, in fact, starting to break down societal cohesion.

Before I cover the main subject of this video, I feel I need to touch on one of the other pernicious hierarchies first.

Anyone who’s been paying attention will have heard of one of these new hierarchies when the discussion turns to the current governmental administration – the hierarchy of racism.  Keir Starmer has embedded this new type of hierarchy into what was once called The Labour Party by treating anti-Semitism much more forcefully than any other type of racism within his party and in society as a whole.  Now, let’s ignore the fact that Starmer equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism for a moment and just say, here and now, that anti-Semitism is a truly bad thing but is it any worse than any other type of racism?  I would say that it categorically isn’t.  Racism is racism and it doesn’t matter who the target is, it’s wrong.  However, that’s not how it’s being treated.  One form of racism has been placed above another to form a basic hierarchy of racism.

What some people don’t realise is that there is a form of hierarchy within the disabled community.  In fact, some disabled people don’t even realise that they have internalised this hierarchy into their thinking.  Before I continue, I will state that not every member of the disabled community has succumbed to this hierarchical thinking but there is a definite structure that has been allowed to form.

This hierarchy of disability is quite simple and, whether acknowledged by the disabled community or not, puts people with physical and/or sensory impairments above those with psychological issues.  I have seen this hierarchy in action when a physically disabled person, a member of the DPAC Facebook group, actually suggested that I shouldn’t have been a member of the group because I only had mental health issues and intimated that mental ill-health isn’t a real disability.  I was actually forced out of the Facebook group for another reason but I would’ve left of my own volition given such a hostile attitude to the mentally unwell.  The fact that a hierarchy of disability has been allowed to form has split the disabled community at a time when solidarity is desperately needed.

I haven’t worked out where the neurodivergent and educationally challenged individuals are placed on the hierarchy of disability because those groups tend to be less vocal due to the complexities of their challenges with social interactions.  However, I’ve noticed that those groups tend to be less judgemental of others disabilities so they wouldn’t place themselves anywhere on the hierarchy of disability, leaving it for the people with physical, sensory or psychological disabilities to do the placement for them.

Unfortunately, it’s not just within the disabled community as a whole that a hierarchy has formed.  There’s a hierarchy of mental illness too, a hierarchy that has come into being though, like the hierarchy of disability, not necessarily consciously constructed.  I have seen this in action too.  Years ago, I was part of a mental health service user research project and I met many mentally unwell people as I helped gather the data the project was looking to compile.  I started to notice that people with the less common mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, tend to view people with “just depression” as less severely affected by their condition.

The truth is, society as a whole, views depression as the ‘common cold of mental health’ because it’s the most common mental health condition and this is reflected in the overuse of the word ‘depression’ in common parlance to describe when someone is a bit sad.  Depression is, however, far more serious than people are led to believe and can be a lot more disabling than one would first believe.

I’m a depressive so, under the hierarchies that I am forced to live, I am at the very bottom according to those who have internalised these structures into their thinking.  According to some of the people with physical or sensory impairments, I am considered either not disabled at all or less deserving of the epithet ‘disabled’ and amongst my own community, the mentally unwell, I am considered by some to be less severely afflicted than them because I suffer with mental health’s common cold.

This wouldn’t be such a problem if the hierarchies of disability and mental illness hadn’t been adopted as current government policy when it comes to disability benefits.  Mental ill-health has always been harder to claim disability benefits for and was the target of the changes to the eligibility criteria for Personal Independence Payments by making depression and anxiety ineligible conditions which reinforces the hierarchy of mental illness that I have described.

These hierarchies are dangerous to the disabled community because it makes it harder to come together as a collective to fight for the justice we all deserve.  Society is fractured enough as it is.  We need to destroy these hierarchical structures that divide the disabled community before it’s too late because the only people who benefit from the divisions are the people in Starmer’s regime.  Do we really want them to win?