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It took me a long time before I could say it, and possibly even longer to come to terms with it. You see, for years after being diagnosed with mental health problems, I didn't want to be diagnosed as disabled too.

I can't put my finger on exactly why, but it was about feeling that I could be doubling the stigma I already face as someone with a mental health problem. Or it might suggest I was less of a person - "rotten to the core" as a friend of mine put it, with tongue firmly in cheek.

It felt all wrong. I could walk, I could talk, I could hear. I had no wheelchair, crutches or guide dog. How, I wondered, could I possibly be disabled? I could just about accept that I had a mental health problem but, like the majority of the population, I didn't think of that as a disability.

Then there's this similarly loaded word 'impairment'. I'd never heard of a 'psychiatric impairment', and I wasn't at all sure I wanted to be told I was 'impaired'. Look it up in the dictionary: "weakened, diminished or damaged", "functioning poorly or inadequately", and "deficient or incompetent" are just three definitions.

It was pointed out that if I were to just grit my teeth and use the word 'disability', it could work to my advantage. Most people I know who have mental health problems wouldn't define themselves as disabled except when it comes to claiming Disability Living Allowance (DLA). It's not that they want to scam the system; it's just that they have to use the term to get the benefit they are entitled to. In fact, I know people on benefits who wouldn't know what the D in DLA stands for.

I've never applied for the benefit, so that wasn't an issue for me. When I started filling in application forms for jobs after my first admission to hospital, it didn't even occur to me to tick the disability box - even when the jobs were with 'Two Tick' employers who guarantee to offer an interview to all disabled candidates with the minimum stated requirements.

I'm not alone in my reluctance to embrace disability. I was recently reading about an employment tribunal case that was thrown out because a man with a mental health problem - one which clearly qualified as a psychiatric impairment under the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) - wouldn't identify as having a disability.

He, and his psychiatrists, agreed that he had a variety of mental health problems for which he needed adjustment at work, but he was damned if he was going to say he was disabled. As a result, the tribunal ruled that his employers had no responsibility under the DDA.

I can't help but wonder what would have happened if a wheelchair user had been in the same position. Would they have had to formally agree that they were disabled or would the tribunal have taken this for granted?

He was a bit of a fool, I think. After all, what's in a word? But given my own reticence to accept the 'D word', I can understand where he was coming from.

I doubt whether this reluctance to identify as disabled applies only to people with psychiatric impairments. I keep hearing the term 'differently abled' used as a friendlier replacement, but to me this phrase holds just as much, if not more, stigma. See, I don't want to be 'different' either!

Sure, there are some things that are different about me, but in what way am I 'differently abled'? That label really does seem to apply to everything in life. But maybe I'll come to terms with that as well.

I would like the language of disability to be more positive, and if that means being more descriptive of the impairment then perhaps that's what is needed. Yet I hate the idea of us all getting bogged down in a quagmire of political correctness.

There's a fab cartoon that always gives me a chuckle. It features a man with a clipboard asking a woman in a wheelchair: "What's it like, being ambulantly challenged?" To which she responds: "What's it like, being euphemistically over-endowed?"

To save us all from euphemistic endowment, I'm happy enough to use the word disabled. And I no longer see any stigma in telling people I have a disability. It took me a few years to accept it, but I think that coming to terms with the word also helped me to come to terms with the condition that I have and the ways in which it will always affect my life.

Knowing that I have a disability doesn't make me rotten to the core; it means that I know my legal rights and that I can identify with a whole group of people who may have different impairments. So, as the now defunct Disability Rights Commission (RIP) once said: "don't dis the disability".