I hate it when people say “[person] is ADHD”. A person is not a disease. If someone has cancer, do you say “my aunt is cancer”? Weird and insulting.
“I’m so OCD”. You ARE obsessive compulsive disorder?
Yeah, you don’t say “I am diabetes/cancer/leprosy”.
No but you do say “I’m diabetic” which uses diabetes as sort of identity within the sentence structure.
Similarly “I’m a cancer survivor” and “I’m a cancer patient” are ways someone with cancer could structure a sentence to give weight to the way cancer and the experiences of cancer fundamentally change this person’s personality and identity.
While “I am ADHD” isn’t perfect, it’s a very new use of language to try and create an identity form, and it will continue to evolve and sound more natural.
Personally I still find myself saying “I’m autistic and I have ADHD” in most situations, but if I know I won’t have to explain the term too much, I do prefer “I’m AuDHD”, because it’s an identity first phrase, and it feels as natural as “I’m autistic” or “I’m diabetic”.
But the difference grammatically between “I’m autistic” and “I’m ADHD” is minimal, yet I agree one sounds fine and the other just sounds stupid. And other than exposure, I can’t place my finger on why.
From the autistic side of things, a lot of us dislike “has autism” or “person with autism” because it implies there’s a hidden, non-autistic person underneath the autism. Not everyone feels this way of course, but for people that do they may transfer that way of speaking onto other things like ADHD as well.
The whole “person with autism is better because it puts the person first” sounds exactly like the kind of BS that autism can lower patience for, anyways.
I think that there are some groups of people who prefer person-first language. For example, “person with epilepsy” is generally preferred to “epilectic person” (n.b. I do not have epilepsy). I also just looked into the history of person-first language and apparently it first arose in the context of people with AIDS, who were sick of being referred to as “AIDS victims” or similar.
In that light, I can understand why some people prefer person-first language. Myself, I am in accord with the general autistic community in calling myself autistic (as an adjective). Occasionally, amongst friends and kin, I may even call myself “an autistic”.
There are others on this wider thread that capture some of my reasons why: I remember, shortly after I was diagnosed, I pondered whether I would take a cure for autism, if one existed. I concluded that I wouldn’t — not because being autistic was a strictly positive thing for me (it certainly made my life harder in many respects), but because I didn’t think that it would be possible to extricate the autism from what is intrinsically me — in short, any “cure” might as well be death.
it’s just a linguistic quirk, english just so happens to put adjectives first (i.e. “autistic person” instead of “person autistic”)
Interesting, thanks for sharing a different view on this. I can understand that. For ADHD it’s the same of course, you can’t separate your personality from it. A question like “Would you like to have not had ADHD/autism?” makes no sense, because then we would have been entirely different people.
I’ve never heard someone say “I am autism” or “[person] is autism” though, like people seem to do with ADHD. In the case of autism, what would you use instead of people-first language?
For autism you’d just say someone is autistic/I’m autistic, I think people just say he’s ADHD/I’m ADHD because I’m not sure there’s a comparable way to adjective-ify ADHD like there is with autism/autistic.
I completely agree. I don’t have autism, it’s not a disease, it’s part of who I am like my ethnicity. I am so fucking tired of having to conform to what neurotypicals think I should be.
“Mrs Jones, I’m afraid your son has Black. Luckily, we caught it early, so with speech therapy, skin-bleaching treatments, and facial reconstruction surgery, he can lead a normal life.”
