In a city as large and as busy as London, it’s easy to forget that everyone has an entire world within their head, filled with ideas and perspectives, people and passions.

This is maybe reflected in their personality and how they present themselves to the world but, as with most things, the true extent of a person’s mind is rarely exhibited to anybody. We are all mad… it’s just that usually it’s only the walls of our rooms and homes that see the true extent of that madness. Nowadays, the word ‘mad’ has become taboo to be used as a descriptor, which is a good decision in moving towards a neurodivergent society. But what about the people who can’t help but be ‘mad’ - something about them that means that they have to have outbursts and eccentric moments and manic periods and days spent staring at the wall.

These are the invisible disabilities which we hear so much about, but most of us never really try to understand the people who have learning difficulties, personality or social abnormalities, or mental health issues. We call these invisible disabilities because there is no way of telling them at a glance, you don’t diagnose these from scans or blood tests, and you might not be able to tell even if your best friend has one.

How would you feel if you were in a professional environment where everybody says, it’s okay for everyone else to be different and to be mentally diverse, but not necessarily you. Even having dyslexia deserves raised eyebrows to many purists and traditionalist students and teachers within the university. I have spent time recently thinking about visible and invisible disabilities. As someone with a so called ‘invisible’ disability I sometimes find myself questioning the use of that word. Sometimes I feel that my disability is very visible - just ask me to stand up and speak and I am certain my stutter will make an appearance or ask me to write an article and I can promise my dyslexia will be there. It doesn’t stop me doing these things but it does make it harder, especially the jokes and laughs I get from people who don’t realize that I’m not just ‘having a moment’ when I misspell ‘generalised’ or can’t say the word ‘synonym’. I don’t mind these too much, but when people still ask me what living with dyslexia is like and whether I’m worried about times when I will be on wards and have to make an instant decision or times when I will be writing prescriptions and spelling something wrong - I have to say that’s not how dyslexia works. I am not less able to be a doctor if I have dyslexia; my decision making and logic skills are just fine - it’s just that the education system isn’t built for people like me who learn in different ways to most people.

I am disabled because society makes me disabled. I know that sounds awfully selfcentred but hear me out; the educational system we are a part of is an inherently disabling environment that affects not just some of us, but almost everyone. The disability comes from out of date traditional teaching and unhealthy competition and relationships within the University. What many people who do not have a disability may not realise is that when a person has a disability, visible or invisible, their environment makes a massive impact on the severity of the disability and sometimes the visibility of the disability.

For example, as a dyslexic student, I am considered to have an invisible disability, whereas a student with say a medical condition requiring an assisting apparatus (anything from a colostomy bag to a crutch or walking frame) are considered to have a visible disability. However, remove the word student, and my disability becomes less important to society, it becomes even less visible.

My employer will most likely not take into account my dyslexia, however many visible disabilities will play a greater role in employment and ability in many employer’s eyes; conversely put me in an exam room with many people with visible disabilities and my disability may affect my ability to do well far more than those with a physical disability. And then there are those who fall in between- do people with partial hearing or who are partially sighted have a visible or invisible disability? Are people with colour blindness disabled?

Realistically there is no way to say whether someone is disabled unless you ask them. I have conducted some interviews with students with learning and physical differences and I asked them the question ‘Are you disabled?’. It sounds like a very probing question, and almost quite offensive in some ways, but having asked it to a few people I found that it was a question they had never thought to ask themselves. The answers differed massively from people who were ‘disabled and proud’, ‘technically were but don’t associate with it’ or the most surprising ‘I am not but I tick it when it’s asked because that is what I am defined as’. The final circumstance interested me the most. Someone who gave me a similar answer was a male student with a visible disability, he told me that he doesn’t consider himself disabled. Furthermore, his close friends didn’t consider him disabled. This was due to the simple fact that in daily life he doesn’t find himself limited in any way. Of course, sometimes certain accessibility measures are useful to maintain normal life but overall this student felt that his medical condition was so well managed it negated the disability. We also discussed people’s attitudes to him, when people treated him as though he was disabled in a negative or unhelpful way it made the student feel more disabled; conversely, when peers acknowledged his disability but didn’t interfere unless asked, it reduces the disability and made it more of an invisible disability.

On the other hand, some of the people with invisible disabilities I met expressed sometimes feeling very vulnerable and unable to do normal activities in day-to-day living. This calls back to the ever-changing nature of disabilities, a visible disability can become invisible in the correct environment and an invisible disability can very suddenly become extremely visible. Not all described themselves as ‘disabled’ but all expressed an uncertainty as to where they fell on the ability spectrum. Some even felt bad to be associated with being disabled because of feelings of guilt that physically they were able compared to many people with the more ‘stereotypical’ visible disabilities; ‘physically I can do everything, but I am just unable to function normally’.

As students we aim to look after people, and we can’t do that if there’s something wrong with us. I mean it’s just hypocritical to group yourself with someone with a painful chronic disease when you have been dealing with a purely mental illness - isn’t it? This is a form of internalised guilt which is reinforced by our environment more than any other factor. Most of us don’t feel that we have a right to feel the way we do, we are not dying, in physical pain or grief, it’s all in our head and so of course we can go on and be bloody grateful while we’re at it. However, every day we cannot ‘choose to be happy’.

There is no choice sometimes, except to do the bare minimum and when we can’t do that and we are tired and scared we are told to just do something you enjoy, to cheer ourselves up and buck up. Despite living in the ‘snowflake’ generation, we still cannot begin to verbalize our mental and emotional pain because every day we see it belittled in the way our peers talk about mental illness in their slang and offhanded descriptors, being told that someone is acting ‘schitzo’ if they are in a manic period or that they are ‘depressing’ when they have to cancel plans. However, having been active in student groups and interested in student welfare, I have to think that these words we use almost daily are also used to belittle our own issues, because when we try to help ourselves, we are belittled by everyone else. When we go to tell our doctors, they say its stress and lack of sleep, that we need more iron or less caffeine, to talk to our mums and stop playing on our phones, to go home and contact counselling.

Everyone has hard times and at university these times can sometimes feel amplified when seemingly we go through things alone. Most of the time, these times end, and people can return to their regular schedules with a little help. It is always the temptation to pretend that these moments never happened, because to admit that they did can call back to moments that many of us would rather forget. That doesn’t mean that they didn’t happen. It doesn’t mean that at one point everything private and invisible within our own heads became suddenly very visible.