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Originally Posted by RedFox
In my previous post, I said that maybe it's from kids imprinting onto disabled people they've seen and wanting to become like them.
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Yes, that's fine. Maybe that's it. But there's still no way to make the obsession go away, to date. Even if we knew for sure that was the case, we still are stuck with BIID.
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How do you know that most doctors and psychologists haven't heard of it? Plenty of people have heard of amputee wannabes because that had been on shows like CSI.
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Because every professional I've ever talked to about it had never heard of it. Because on the BIID discussion groups, that is the case for the vast majority of sufferers. Because scholarly articles written on BIID by the few medical professionals who do so, mention that BIID is mostly unknown in the field.
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Saying that BIID is real doesn't make it so. There are tests that can show that people are deaf. How would other people be able to determine if someone has BIID?
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How would other people be able to determine if someone has any one of a myriad of "invisible disabilities" or other mental conditions such as phobias?
BIID is determined by an obsessive and irrational desire for disability that goes back to early childhood. If you have that, you have BIID. Like many mental illnesses (such as depression, phobias), you can't "prove" it to anyone. Your behavior and what you say about how you feel is the only proof you can offer to anyone. BIID is not alone in not being provable by objective scientific tests, many common mental conditions are like that. That doesn't make it not real.
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Pointing to a BIID site isn't enough. It could've been written by people with BIID. How about independent studies by non BIID people?
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That is precisely the problem. There have been very few, too few. We want more. But it's hard to interest professionals in this topic because it effects such a small number of people and they want their research dollars to go where it can help a greater number of people (understandably). Thus, not much is going on research-wise on BIID. But I wholeheartedly support the concept of independent BIID studies. Bring them on!
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How can you show that the vast majority of them are happy if they achieve their goals? Are there any studies that do not relay on anecdotal evidence? Anecdotal evidence is not good evidence because it can be cherry-picked.
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I agree, and that is why we want more studies and we SPECIFICALLY want scientific studies done on these people. But so far, no one has conducted such a study. So we rely on anecdotal evidence. That's all we have. But there is something to be said for first-hand accounts.
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The issue with pretending would be the use of services meant for those who physically need them, like spaces on buses. Sign language interpreters and relay operators are finite resources. Would deaf pretenders want to use them up? If they do that, they'd degrade the lives of deaf people who have those resources taken away from them.
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I understand your point. But the issue there is in providing more resources for everyone who needs them. The issue is not that there is a very small population of BIID sufferers whose mental illness requires that they make use of some of these resources. The real issue is providing resources for everyone in the disabled community (and I am including mental illnesses in the disabled community here). Let's not refuse resources to those with mental illnesses, but let's work on improving the availability of those resources for everyone.
It is not fair to say "a person with Condition X needs a finite resource, so the person with Condition Y just has to suffer." The person with Condition Y also has a right, a real and undeniable right, to aid. People with BIID have a right to therapy. Right now, pretending is about the only therapy that anyone has found. I am open to other therapies that don't include pretending, except that to-date, there are none. Give me some options. Until other therapies are found, we have a right to deal with our condition the best way we can, just like anyone else does.
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In an earlier post, I posted a link about a deaf wannabe who had low self-esteem. How many transabled people are like that? ...transabled people include feeling alienated from others and then feeling empathy for disabled people who are also alienated, then becoming obsessed with the disabilities. How about working on the feeling of being alienated?
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That is WAY too simplistic. If BIID were simply a question of self-esteem and a need for attention, it would respond to traditional therapies designed to address these issues. The fact is, it does not. You can work on my self-esteem all day and while I may feel better about myself, my BIID will not go away. If BIID were about self-worth, then explain to me why talk therapy has had so little success with treating BIID.
Besides which, as any person with a disability ought to know, you don't usually get positive, affirming attention from the majority of people who believe you to be disabled. They are either weird with you, or way WAY too sugary sweet, or try to help you when you don't need help, or stare at you like a beast in a cage. If my wanting to use a wheelchair was about self-esteem and attention, I would have abandoned the wheelchair long ago because the attention is far from positive most of the time. At best, it's neutral. But I continue to use the wheelchair, because it's about being myself, and not about how other people treat me.
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I also wonder what transabled people would do if they were sent back to the Paleolithic Age.
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I imagine we would be among the dead, along with a great many of other people with physical and mental disabilities.