Sysmeds seem to be completely unable to be critical of the DSM or anything else they read if it’s “official,” lol.
The fight to exclude non-distressed impairment from definitions of disorder is a hard-fought ongoing battle by disability activists.
Currently, what is considered “functioning wrong” is determined entirely by (white Western) standards of what is “bad functioning”: when something goes against a set notion of what the body should be like/do. Once again sysmeds (like certain other bigoted/exclusionist/identity-invalidating/-disbelieving groups) essentialize the “default” human body (or what they consider the default) at the expense of individual needs and desires and experiences. If the body/mind is working “wrongly,” but the individual is okay with it and not distressed by it, where’s the issue? Why is it an illness, why does it need to be “fixed”?
Consider that not everyone aligns with the expected default regarding what they want and feel in comparison to what their body/mind is doing. And that is okay.
Major strawman/edge case there: anti-sysmedicalists have never said that the distress we discuss is “distress from knowing you have DID (they’re probably thinking of people feeling despair/internalized stigma).” We acknowledge that you can be in distress from experiencing DID while unaware/in denial of it. Not what this is about. If you “have parts” but are not in distress, it is not DID.
If someone “experiences issues” with relationships/work, that means they are distressed by it. But distress has to be evaluated in isolation: is their distress caused by having alters itself, or the alters fighting/switching a lot but not having alters itself (as in, if the fighting & frequent switching were addressed there would no longer be any distress), or is it because they are forced to do relationships/work because of society/capitalism forcing them into distressing situations they would not experience if they had choice in a liberated world?
Unless they aren’t distressed, but still do relationships/work in a way normative society considers “wrong”/rulebreaking/inefficient/whatever, and go through that totally aware and fine with it, and although they are incapable of forcing themselves to conform they are totally fine with not conforming. In which, once again, the problem would be with external society alone, not the way their brain works itself.
Perhaps think for a damn second before you start saying “disorder is when you can’t be a good little capitalist stooge on the assembly line being as productive as your peers even if you don’t have a problem with that as long as your bosses do.” Perhaps consider where that rhetoric likely came from, and who would benefit from it.
(Note: I’m not saying situations 1 or 2 would not qualify as DID/disordered. But clarifications.)
Seems like sysmeds on average/mostly consider autism inherently a disorder. But why would my autism be a disorder, if in an accommodating and non-stigmatizing world I would not experience any distress from the fact that I have it, and all the distress I experience right now is allowed to be because of/caused by external factors? (Obviously every autistic person has different experiences. But also, obviously, nuance exists.)
I do have actual disorders and the experience is quite different, they’re mostly hell with a few occasional reprieves (though I’m kind of recovering and have been doing better these past few months) but yeah, I’m extremely pissed off at medicalists trying to equate the two experiences. I (personally) would greatly appreciate if I had the option to make them/their symptoms go away entirely, as they’re quite unpleasant. I think it's quite ridiculous that certain people would claim experiencing that is equivalent to merely experiencing abnormality/non-normativity/divergence/difference.
Going to (shamelessly) self-promote my essay here, I scribbled it down at 2am two months ago and have been too low on spoons to edit out any potentially undesirable bits but I’m too tired of explaining the same things over and over and it’s reasonably comprehensive.
This post is not about origins, it is about currently experienced effects. Do not complain about this post being pro-/anti-endo, I’m pro-endo but that’s not really relevant to this.