Why Disability and Mental Health Are Impossible to Separate

I’m comfortable with the fact that I’m blind. I was fortunate to have a good childhood, a good education, and especially over the last few years with the advancements in technology, I consider myself to be far more confident than I once was. But it’s no secret that there is an impact that one’s disability has on their mental health, whether it be due to transportation, discrimination, misconceptions, or challenges that people don’t realize we face. And I don’t think we talk about it enough, but we should. And it’s not something I talk about enough, but I want to take my own advice. 

When I attended the Illinois School for the Visually Impaired, there was a period when I was juggling those classes with college classes at the local community college in the small town of Jacksonville. I remember one of the teachers telling me back then, before I started classes, that as a blind student I was going to have to work twice as hard as my sighted classmates. At the time, I disregarded this advice, thinking of it as a peptalk gone wrong. How was that supposed to make me feel better? 

And then, as I attended college and especially when I went from community college to a university, I realized she was absolutely right. I was working twice as hard. There were a lot of challenges, most of which did, in fact, center on my blindness. Inaccessible assignments, needing extended time on tests, other accommodations that most professors were understanding about and willing to give me. But that’s when I realized how my disability had an impact on my mental health. 

I was taught to send out introductory emails to my professors a few weeks before classes started with a list of my accommodations, so the professors could receive some advance notice that there would be a blind student in their class and what they could expect. I got very welcoming responses, and the professors seemed to appreciate the advance notice and the way I advocated for myself. 

But there seemed to be this anxiety lingering in my mind as I composed the emails. It felt good to advocate, but advocacy can sometimes be pretty nerve-wracking no matter how many times you do it. Unless someone has a disability themselves where asking for reasonable accommodations is pretty routine, they may not understand why it can be so stressful. All we want is to be heard and accepted. For someone to say, “Sure, it’s no problem.” And most of the time, that’s the response I get. Other times, not so much. Either way, I always felt a little nervous. 

As I’ve grown up, especially since college but even during college, I’ve learned the world was not designed for us. We live in a very visual world. There aren’t enough audio described movies. Restaurant menus are often pictures of the dishes instead of presenting them in text. On websites, those “verify I’m not a robot” prompts don’t always come with a way to do an audio challenge. These may seem small, but trust me, it adds up, and it can impact me and the way I view things. 

To start off, I used to love going to movie theaters. It started when I went to school in DeKalb. The movie theater was great. I’d call ahead, and the manager would help at the concession stand, making sure I got the correct device that would provide audio descriptions. And then, somewhere along the way, calling ahead wasn’t good enough. 

Various movie theaters would give me a device with dead batteries, or the device for the deaf or hard of hearing. To be honest, it became less enjoyable. I expected these things. I expected my parents to miss part of the movie because one of them had to go to the front and talk to the staff. And while they didn’t mind, I certainly did. 

So, I opt for streaming movies now. I do sometimes miss going to the theaters, but it mentally wears me down. Will the device work? What if it doesn’t? What if I'm with another blind person and we just sit there throughout the entire movie not knowing what’s going on? People may not realize it, but having all these thoughts constantly swarming around my brain on the way to the theaters gets exhausting. Why not just stream it at home where I know it’ll be audio described? That doesn’t mean I’ll never set foot in a movie theater again, but it doesn’t mean I don’t hesitate a little. And unfortunately, I think sometimes we become so accustomed to barriers that we’re almost desensitized to them. They’re just normal, and it’s unfortunate. 

Ride-share discrimination is also quite prevalent in our community, even without a service dog. I often get canceled by ride-share drivers once I send the message that I’m blind, and I once had a driver tell me she’d report my ride because I shouldn’t be using the service at all if I needed assistance. That rattled me, and I was very nervous to take any rides by myself since then. It’s a very real thing that happens to us quite often. I have plenty of friends that get denied rides because they have a service animal. For some, it’s a daily occurrence. Constantly stressing about whether a driver will cancel, or whether we will be able to successfully get from point A to point B on the first try is something not everyone has to think about, but a lot of us in the disabled community do. 

The good thing about having such a community that sometimes feels very, very small, where everyone seems to know everyone, is that it makes it easy to form connections. We automatically have a support system. We have people who just get it. Not that nondisabled people don’t, but they just don’t experience the things we do—the discrimination, the barriers, the constant need to advocate. And while those things can be hard to deal with, it’s a comfort knowing we’re not alone in dealing with them. We have a community to share stories, opinions, and give advice, and people to listen and empathize when our inaccessible world brings us down sometimes. Disability can impact mental health, but there’s no doubt that it can also form—and strengthen—connections.