I know I just reblogged this or q'd it but actually I have some thoughtsâą on this. As someone with both physical disabilities and mental illnesses who has had to ask for accommodations in school, there is a small grain of truth to the visible disabilities getting accommodated more (note: that does not make it okay to invalidate those struggles or needs for accommodations, and it really depends on the specific disability).
In high school I started experiencing hearing loss, to the point where it was affecting my ability to do school work. I got hearing aids and my mom set up a meeting with my teachers and the principal. I was offered an FM system that the school/province would pay for, given the option of leaving class to work in a quiet area (certain frequencies and sounds cause a lot of pain for my ears/head).
The teachers were really understanding, in a way the same school had NOT been understanding or supportive when my mental health was garbage.
I know there is a lot of ableism associated with the supports given/not given by the school administrators, but I think a lot of the time it comes down to concrete aids vs abstract needs.
What I mean is, offering a physical aid like an FM system is something concrete, they can physically see it, and it automatically means I can hear the teacher regardless of where I'm sitting in the glass and background noise. Whereas with my depression suffocating me, I didn't /know/ what accommodations I needed, and neither did my mom. So going to the school and saying "hey Alia is really depressed and needs help, please help her", the school says "yeah that sucks have you tried going to mental health services?" And that's about the extent of the recognition you get.
Looking back, they could have offered flexible deadlines, the option of working in a quiet space, actually educating teachers on mental illness and how to talk to students about it (they still haven't, a teacher at the school recently told my sister to get over her anxiety and that doing the thing making her extremely anxious "wasn't that bad")
In college, when my chronic pain was at its worst and my treatments stopped working, I had to request accommodations mid semester. I was given a TON of flack for not asking in advance, even though at the beginning of the school year my treatment was working and thus I didn't /need/ accommodations. The program I was in, attendance was mandatory for all classes and labs (sure labs makes sense, it was animal health technology, you gotta learn how to do the lab work and hands on stuff). Even after I missed 3 weeks of classes because my pain was unbearable and I couldn't get in for Botox soon enough (it wore off 2 months sooner than normal), teachers were docking marks for items handed in literally an hour past the deadline.
The accommodations offered was to have another student give me their notes if I missed a lecture, and have the instructor record the lectures. The recorder was shitty, I frequently couldn't get the notes or the slide show sent to me, and because my ears are not friends with my brain, just listening to an instructor explain the anatomy of a horse while I look at the text book teaches me very little.
I requested that they not dock marks for me missing lectures due to pain, and not require a doctor's note every time. I lived in a small town, and to go to the hospital and sit in a noisy ER for 4+ hours to see a doctor to write a note and /maybe/ give me a muscle relaxant that doesn't help with the type of headache I was having, was a waste of time. I was better off sleeping off the pain and returning to classes the next day. Spending a day in the ER used so many spoons I would have to miss the following day, which usually doubled the amount of missed class time. Having my diagnosis written down and given to the accessibility office and department head did next to nothing (other than getting the recorder for lectures, that really didn't help me learn).
If I missed instruction from the farm for our dog walking rotation (due to being home in pain), there was no written record of the changes, fellow students wouldn't inform me of the changes, but would write in their peer reviews that I wasn't following the updated route, which reduced my grade to 30%. (The farm manager told the group one night not to walk the dogs past a certain pen, no one told me OR the instructor who graded the dog walking tasks. When I told the teacher I wasn't told about the change until after I had walked there (one classmate did tell me and not mark me poorly, but 4/8 marked me poorly), and she said she wasn't made aware of the change, I asked if she would not use those reviews in my marks for that rotation. She declined. You had to write WHY you graded your peers the way you did, so we both knew I was graded badly SOLELY because I walked further than the farm manager decided we could.
ANYWAYS, that was a really round about way of saying that in my experience, if the accommodation is something the administration can concretely see, and mostly removes the learning barrier, your odds of getting reasonable accommodations is higher. With that being said, you don't have to shit on people with visible disabilities because your invisible disability is not recognized or accomadated. Debating who has it worse does nothing but absolve the educational institution/employer/government/whatever of their duty to provide equitable access.
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