A PSA for anybody interested: It more supportive and less potentially harmful to use phrases such as 'a person suffering from anorexia' than it is to call somebody 'an anorexic'. This can apply to all mental illness!

Thank you for mentioning this, your points are important to bring up in regards to a variety of conditions. I do want to add the perspective of using person centred language as opposed to person-first though, just because this isn’t the way everyone likes to talk about themselves or be talked about all the time.

A lot of people prefer person first language (I have _____) for many conditions, but identity is complex and in modern times there’s been a sort of renaissance to reclaim identity. Some people (like me) prefer identity first for things like autism, ADHD, Deafness, etc. often because we can’t separate these states from the way we interact with the world. It’s a defining feature of our personality, community, and identity.

Therapy resources, academic articles, and medical papers are often behind the times on these issues, especially since academia has a history of not listening to the disabled community.

This is why it’s best when interacting with individual people to ask them how they prefer to talk about themselves (“Do you prefer I use person-first or identity first language to describe you?”) or to use context cues. I use a mix for my different conditions depending on the grammar and context, but I have a preference for identity first.

/r/EUGENIACOONEY Thread