Carerfication: A Word I Just Made Up

A disabled parking space overlaid with a panel which reads "Carerfication: A Word I Just Made Up"

Carerfication is a word that I have coined, and it refers to the process by which individuals are forced into a carer role for a disabled loved one, by societal pressures/expectations as well as by other individuals in their lives. I needed a word that was specific to this experience; we have “parentification”, which is a useful piece of vocabulary for discussing specifically childhood experiences and a parent/child dynamic, and we have “adultification”, which again refers to children but this time specifically Black children who are expected to grow up faster than their white peers. These are incredibly useful words, but they don’t cover the whole picture of what I’m trying to convey with “carerfication”.

Recently, someone I love very much was hospitalised with suicidal ideation, and held for less than 72 hours before being released back to us. On the day they wanted to release my loved one, I stormed into the hospital reception to beg someone, anyone to keep my person in longer, because we had no idea how we were going to keep them safe. I wound up on the phone, in tears and sitting on the pavement outside, because they wouldn’t budge – they insisted my person would be better off “in the community”, which might have been true a few hundred years ago when our communities were bigger than about five close friends and family members. As it stands, my person’s housemate and I were shitting ourselves when my person came home.

Every argument I made for my person to stay in hospital was met with a steadfast insistence that my person needed to be in the community, and when I raised the issue of keeping my person away from their daily meds for their own safety, I was reassured that “their housemate can be in charge of that”. Their housemate is a warm, caring, diligent person whom I respect very much, but she’s also not a trained healthcare worker in any sense. I don’t actually know what the legalities are of us confiscating my person’s property, let alone physically restraining them like we’d had to on the day they were hospitalised. We certainly don’t have the right or the means to drug my person in the way that, you know, a hospital or something might be able to do.

This whole debacle disappointed me, but it didn’t shock me. I’d been met with “can your [loved one] look after you?”, “can you partner do it for you?” and variations upon “we don’t have the resources to look after you” throughout my own journey with the NHS. I want to pause here to mention that I think the NHS is an incredible body that does incredible things, and its purposeful underfunding is designed to erode confidence in it as a body. This means that even though I love the NHS to bits, I’m forced to consider things like private psychotherapy in order to have a hope in hell of receiving the care I need, but I’m not happy about it. One obvious way to alleviate this problem is to fund the NHS adequately, so that it doesn’t have to fob its responsibilities off onto members of the public.

In the UK, if you receive Carer’s Allowance (which is predicated on a whole host of things and which is unavailable to full-time students) you are paid £69.70 a week. To earn this princely sum, you have to be acting as a carer for at least 35 hours a week. The mathematically gifted among you may have already spotted that this amounts to just under £2 an hour, a mere fraction of the UK minimum wage which is set at £9.50 in 2022. Not only is that disgusting, but almost all carers end up putting in a lot more than that 35 hours, particularly if you live together. Let’s imagine that you get 9 restful hours of sleep a night, but your every waking moment is spent with, around or thinking about your disabled loved one, attending to their needs and supervising them. That means that you’re putting in about 105 hours a week, and your Carer’s Allowance comes out at £0.66/hour. I can hear you thinking, “Well, it wouldn’t be fair to pay them the same amount as professional carers, who’ve undergone training and have experience,” which I can kind of understand – but personally, I think that carers of loved ones are faced with a harder task, since they typically have zero training and experience and a great deal more emotional involvement. I can’t tell you what I think would be a fair wage for carers of loved ones, because frankly I don’t think there’s a fair way to wrangle someone into the role of “carer” and I don’t think it’s fair on disabled people to plug the gaps in their care with their own friends and family.

Most of my firsthand experience with carerfication comes from the world of mental health treatment, for obvious reasons, but I’ve noticed it with physical disabilities, too. The fact that my partner can drive seems to negate the fact that I cannot, nor can I safely navigate public transit 100% of the time – so she’s expected to be my carer by way of driving me anywhere at any time, and that’s considered enough freedom of movement for me (even though there’s every possibility that she’s controlling or, I dunno, busy with her own life). She helps me phone the GP surgery because they don’t have a non-phone option for anxious bitches with auditory processing issues (like myself). Any practical thing that you can imagine being made more difficult by anxiety, trauma, joint pain or hypermobility is supposed to be done or helped with by my partner, or by my mum and friends when she isn’t around. This works for me, for now, because I’m in a relationship that is not controlling (and it doesn’t hurt that my partner has a healthcare background).

That last part is key. I firmly believe that inappropriate carerfication of other people in a disabled person’s life can hand their power and autonomy straight to an abuser, and makes us all more susceptible to physical, emotional, sexual and/or financial abuse.  When the care you need is constant and complex, like my person coming home from hospital, your power can be handed over to multiple people (you know, because we’re not professional carers and therefore have other things going on), which only increases the chances of one or more people taking advantage of this. Random members of the public are not only expected, but are actively encouraged to take control of disabled people’s medications, communication with their healthcare provider(s), means of leaving the house (“get your housemate to hide his keys” is not an appropriate response to “I want to walk into traffic,” just FYI), finances, any other admin, etc. It does not take a domestic violence expert to see how this could become a near-inescapable problem.

Even when this transfer of power is agreed upon and the carer in question is never going to be a dick about it, it can feel demeaning and shitty that someone who has another role in your life is forced to act as your carer. I’ve already ranted about dignity on here, but I really believe that that, more than independence, is the key here. The answer is not to force disabled people to conform to some idea of “independent” that not even every abled adult can reach; it’s to fund health and social care services and to provide disabled people with adequate care, from professionals who 1. are trained, 2. have multiple levels of oversight, 3. are supported themselves through Occupational Health, 4. are being paid fairly and 5. are able to go the fuck home after eight hours and forget about other people’s crises. When you expect friends and family to act as carers, you expect them to deal with a whole host of emotions including fear, sympathy, frustration and helplessness, as well as expecting non-emotional labour from them like running errands, household tasks etc. This can do a few things: it can make the disabled party feel guilty that their loved one is being pushed into this position; it can make the disabled party feel grossly undignified, especially where a loved one has to deal with physical things like helping with the toilet, medical devices etc.; and it can alter the relationships disabled people can form with their loved ones, since they will almost all include this wonky, undignified power dynamic to some extent. It’s really hard to have sex with the same person who has just helped wash your pee-soaked trousers, for example, so sexual and romantic relationships always take place in the context of an uphill battle to feel safe, grown-up and attractive – and again, this is not a problem that needs to exist. I understand that fully-trained carers don’t just fall out of the sky, but millions of pounds (it’s hard to pin down exact figures and they often come from dubious sources) are spent just on feeding MPs every year (whose salaries, by the way, are £84,144/year, or about 10 times the amount that you get to live on through Student Finance), and millions more on other pointless bullshit. I refuse to believe the money isn’t there, but the willingness definitely isn’t, especially while the government can so cheaply replace actual carers with members of the public. The dignity and needs of disabled people need to be prioritised over cash, as do the needs and feelings of people caring for their loved ones. All this blog post really aimed to do was introduce y’all to the word “carerfication” and explain why I think it’s its own problem, separate from phenomena like parentification and adultification (although definitely compounded by them – as a white person I’m not sure I can speak to the adultification part in too much detail, but in my experience, the normalisation of throwing caring responsibilities at people who are not prepared for them logically leads to the parentification of children and especially children of disabled adults). I don’t have all the answers, but I feel like this is an aspect of being disabled that we don’t yet have enough vocabulary for, so “carerfication” is my contribution.


PS: Among all my personal chaos, I recently had the opportunity to talk to Aria Vega on POV by Lustery, and I would love for y’all to check out my episode as well as, frankly, every episode – it’s a brilliant podcast 💙

Autism at Private School

It surprises people to learn that I went to private school.

It might be the bright blue hair, the piercings or the sex blog, but I take comfort in knowing that people don’t get a private school vibe from me. I know plenty of kids who really enjoyed the privilege of private school, but I was certainly not one of them and I was certainly not alone in that.

I was in a difficult position as someone who, yes, was paying fees – but who was paying those fees from a tightly-controlled trust fund that could pay fees and little else. We were never loaded, and things got worse throughout my five years there, until Year 11 (which, for non-Brits, is when 15- and 16-year-olds sit their GCSE exams, which determine which colleges they can get into and which are hyped up to the kids as being far more important than they actually seem to have been). In Year 11 we fled domestic violence and ended up in probably the coldest house in Staffordshire, and that’s what widened my eyes to the bubbled nature of private schools and other rich-people institutions, how they existed in their own reality that seemed truly ignorant to the shit that normal people experience and how I had, somehow, found myself on the outside of the bubble.

I’d felt Other for as long as I could remember, but (thanks in no small part to my mum’s excellent parenting) I started out proud of my oddness, considering “weird” to be a badge of honour. I didn’t mind being the weird kid at all until private school, at which point it became clear that I wasn’t supposed to be there, being weird. When people ask me whether I was bullied in high school, my honest answer is, “I don’t know.”

Private school kids, in my experience at least, don’t hit you, and they rarely yell slurs at you. Instead, they create an atmosphere of hostility that you can either co-create with them, or fall victim to. It’s insidious, all whispers and giggles and social media posts and questions with no correct answer (like when I came out as bi and was grilled for what felt like hours about which of the popular girls I fancied the most), and it’s impossible to point to singular instances of them making you feel like shit because it’s pervasive, built into the culture of private school much like other bits of ableism are.

Oh, which reminds me: my private school was not well-equipped for disabled students at all, which I hear is not uncommon of private schools. The buildings were big and old with brutal staircases and very limited elevator access, sprawled across a campus that was big enough to require a ten-minute gap between lessons. When I was diagnosed with autism, the school – already dismayed at my self-harm and chaotic energy – was at a loss, and the only autism-specific resource I remember receiving was a set of laminated flashcards from the Autism Outreach Team (which were of no use to me as flashcards but which I stimmed with until they fell apart). The rule was that you couldn’t eat outside of the canteen, but I won permission to go, with one friend, outside of either canteen (yes, we had two. No, we didn’t need two) to eat somewhere quieter and with fewer bodies to bump into. Unfortunately, I had to explain that I’d been given this permission to almost every staff member I encountered, since apparently word had not got out that there would be a weirdo permitted to eat their Nutella sandwiches in the wild, and I hid in my form room whenever I could, no matter the nice weather or the presence of rambunctious boys, who kind of defeated the point of quiet lunchtime. I also ended up exempt from PE, and allowed to drop Latin, which meant that there were several hours a week I had to be accounted for. Now, in my school’s defence, they started out by putting me in the library to do some schoolwork during these hours, which seems pretty reasonable. What did seem unreasonable was their objection to my writing fanfic on the library computers (not even smut – I didn’t and don’t understand why they saw no benefit in my writing things that were not strictly school-related, but I’m not a teacher). The librarian snitched on me, and I like to phrase this next part as dramatically as possible: I was shut in a cupboard for my library crimes.

Phrased less dramatically, they decided to put me somewhere with no computer access. When they said “Learning Resource Centre” I perked up, thinking perhaps there were actually some resources in this godforsaken school. Instead, I was led to a cupboard in the Maths building, coated in cheerful blue paint but still, a cupboard. If it wasn’t a cupboard originally, it was being used as one, with a desk and a chair dwarfed by shelves and shelves of stationery.

They put me in the stationery cupboard for getting distracted from my schoolwork.

(Hilariously, this was when I wrote some of my better fanfic, because I handwrote it in the cupboard and then actually proofread it as I was typing it up. Also, I listened to a lot of MCR and Fall Out Boy, because nobody was checking on me to see that I’d slipped an earbud in. I’d go so far as to say that some of my favourite hours were those quiet ones in the fucking cupboard, away from the constant hum of kids talking and the paranoia it could induce. I wrote and watched clouds out of the window and probably recharged my sanity a great deal before having to go back to the chaos that was home.)

There are plenty of other moments I look back on and am filled with emotions on the resentful-to-horrified spectrum. One that still lives as a thorn in my sided is that I was told explicitly that I couldn’t put in an Extenuating Circumstances claim for my DT coursework, because fleeing domestic violence isn’t acute in the way a bereavement is. This was false, and my claim probably would have been accepted, raising my grade (I got a C overall, having scored an A on the exam but been dragged down by my D-grade electronics project). I don’t know whether I was lied to or simply a victim of the ignorance that comes of only letting a handful of the most socially-acceptable disabled kids into your school.

(There was also the blackmail incident, but I’m so tempted to put that story on YouTube that I’m not going to detail it here, except to say that I don’t think any laws were broken.)

I truly don’t believe there was any explicitly-discussed, agreed-upon agenda to treat disabled kids like shit. I don’t think they cared enough about us for that, to be honest. They simply refused to engage with the notion that some of their perfect, posh little students could be disabled, and as a result they had no resources at the ready for kids like me, no policies or alternatives or anything, just a cupboard. I felt distant from my neurotypical peers and forgotten by my school, and other private school kids I’ve talked to can relate, whether they’re autistic, otherwise learning-disabled, or any other kind of disabled.

I would like to end this blog post with the sentiment that private schools should do better, but my experience there shaped my angry leftist belief that actually, private schools shouldn’t exist. I didn’t manage to get a better education through money, but I did access the privilege of having a more prestigious education that looked better on applications. Schools have the power, I believe, to really level out the playing field for all kinds of kids and to unify them under the banners of equitable education and community. I don’t think private schools are going to do anything more than further distance kids from each other, imbuing the sense that they’re either distinctly superior or distinctly inferior to other kids. Education should be at such a high standard across the country that the only additional benefits money can get you are a comfier seat, but we’ve got quite a while to go.

If you’re a current or ex-private school kid, my sympathies to you. Please follow Baby Morgan’s example and be subversive at every opportunity, run for student council and be as loud as you safely can about the beautiful ways in which you’re different. (Also, if you’re a current private school kid, please click away from this blog, because I assume you’re not yet 18/21/the age of consent in your location. You’ll have plenty of time to look at weird sex blogs when you’re older, but right now please try and enjoy being a kid. Kids should get to enjoy being themselves.)

REVIEW: Sickness and Lies

Note: this documentary is not good, and if you’re disabled you might find it very upsetting. You might also find this review upsetting as a result, so feel free to skip it if you need to.


It has taken me a week to watch a 25-minute video.
Obviously, some of the reason for that is the cognitive fog that comes of holding an alphabet soup of mental health diagnoses, and that I’m supposed to be writing a dissertation. But most of the reason it took me a while is because, friends, this one hurt.
The disabled community is not unfamiliar with being mocked and/or dissected in mainstream media, having their diagnoses doubted and generally being treated like shit, within documentaries and outside of them. I was expecting this to be bad, so it’s not that I was disappointed. It was an extremely angry kind of hurt.
The first thing I saw about this documentary was Jessica Kellgren-Fozard’s Tweet about it, stating that she firmly declined to take part in the project because she disagreed with the premise. I’ve followed Jessica’s career for a number of years now and I respect and trust her as a content creator, meaning that I also trust that what she has said is true. So yes, I started from an angry place in watching this doc, but only because I knew that footage of Jessica Kellgren-Fozard had been used without her permission. I hoped, though, that this little sprinkle of unethical journalism would be an exception, not the rule.
The premise of this documentary, apparently, is to investigate the recent phenomenon of “Munchausen’s by Internet” (which, I would like to note, was invented by a white man). Essentially, Munchausen’s by Internet is a factitious disorder linked to and driven by online interactions with other people, and I personally (as someone with, admittedly, zero qualifications on the matter) don’t think it’s a real thing. It’s my opinion that yes, some factitious disorders are probably made worse by unregulated internet access, but the vast, vast majority of these people are legitimately disabled, enjoying community and acceptance for possibly the first time and eager to share in a space where that’s welcomed. Regardless, the documentary also looks at people trying to diagnose others with MBI or otherwise trying to prove that they are not, in fact, disabled.
Sounds like fun, right?
Infuriatingly, the documentary provides no numbers about most of these things. We’re informed that “many of the accusers are people with chronic illnesses themselves,” but there’s no clarification as to an exact number or proportion. They have no stats on how often people are malingering (which, I should note, then also makes them ill as someone suffering from a factitious disorder or similar), nor on how often disabled people are harassed about it. They don’t present any data about disabled people’s internet usage or about their wellbeing as it relates to internet usage; it’s all interviews and broad statements. One statement that was absent of numbers but caught my attention was when the online chronic illness community was described as having “spiralled” in recent years. Not “grown”, not “exploded”, but “spiralled”, because obviously the expansion of our community is a negative. They also draw attention to the fact that the number of chronically ill people is growing, especially among young women, to which I say two things: 1. Your data only shows you the growing number of diagnoses, which could be due to a huge range of factors including more comprehensive healthcare access, changes in the diagnostic criteria of certain disorders, etc., etc., and 2. Young women are one of the most thoroughly silenced groups out there. If the number of diagnosed-disabled young women is growing, could it be possible that it’s because cultural shifts have allowed them to be diagnosed? And could it also be possible that a supportive and informative online community is helping with that? Of course, they don’t dwell on any of this, because they’re too busy panicking about how many disabled Instagram users there are nowadays.
I tried to draw hope from the fact that the presenter of the program is also disabled, but a cynical voice kept asking me whether, perhaps, the BBC had chosen a disabled presenter to mitigate the obvious yuckiness of the program’s premise. She expressed that she began making the program as a result of falling down an online “rabbit hole” about chronically ill people, and the people who accuse them of faking.
Allow me to stop everything right there. I’m doing a Linguistics MA. I spend a lot of time investigating the way people frame things, what they bring to the foreground and what they do not. I noticed almost immediately that, wherever possible, the term “chronically ill” was being used instead of “disabled”. I’m not sure why, but I have two theories: the optimistic one is that this is because the BBC knew that not everyone identifies with or wants to use the label “disabled”; the cynical one is that they didn’t want to emphasise disability, because disabled people are, in the UK, a minority group protected by law (specifically, the 2010 Equality Act) and even if this documentary doesn’t constitute a hate crime, acknowledging that you’re closely dissecting the disabled community might make you sound like more of a prick than if you say “chronically ill”. (This documentary does a lot of work to avoid seeming prickish. None of it is successful.)
Then there’s the online bit. Yes, these are predominantly online communities that are being examined, both of ill people and of their doubters, but there was no discussion of disabled people forming community IRL, and, more annoyingly still, the discussion about backlash and suspicion was almost entirely focused on Reddit. A lot of people who watch this documentary might be inclined to think, “Ah, yeah, but Reddit is full of know-it-alls, argumentative bastards and people who are just generally cunts, so I don’t imagine this happens anywhere else online, and ill people can just click away from Reddit if they’re upset,” which wouldn’t be unreasonable. Unfortunately, this kind of thing happens on every platform I’ve ever used – Tumblr, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram… they all have some lurkers who are hoping you’ll “disprove” your own disability. This behaviour is oppressive and inescapable, it is directed at members of our community within our own online community spaces, and, as even the documentary highlights, it can lead to real-life harm.
The trouble is that the documentary suggests that the harm that comes to ill people most often is self-inflicted as a result of trying to “prove” the existence of one’s disabilities; it shows interviewees recounting their experiences with coordinated harassment and doxxing, but then immediately returns to the topic of people intentionally making their symptoms worse or inventing new ones. One influencer makes reference to people who “list off every single diagnosis, or sometimes even their medications” (emphasis mine), her tone suggesting that this is a psychologically unhealthy behaviour that is driven by a need to disprove Redditors and their ableist friends. It’s my experience that when people list their conditions and/or medications, at least part of their reasoning is that someone else with that same condition, or using that same medication, can spot that someone is willing to talk about those things and can ask questions, compare experiences and receive encouragement. Again, yes, I do imagine that there are some people with actual factitious disorders who should maybe avoid that kind of content for their own sake, but I also imagine that they’re a very, very small minority.
This was another bit of framing that frustrated me. Consistently, throughout this doc, behaviours like posting symptom lists, lists of diagnoses, photos related to medical care, etc., have all been treated as though they are done solely for the purposes of proving yourself to be ill. They did mention, sort of, that the disabled community can be quite supportive and caring, but they didn’t consider for a moment that the things disabled people post are for the sake of other disabled people, rather than for the abled audience trying to expose them as liars. There was no use of the word “destigmatise” even though that seems like a pretty high priority for many disabled people, especially people with more “gross” disabilities like those related to digestion, or diagnoses which make you behave differently from your neurotypical peers. Wanting to destigmatise the specifics of disability, one’s healthcare journey, bodies that look different from what’s typical and the difficulties associated with being disabled is certainly the reason I post about mine, and it seems to me to be the main reason people share this information, for a disabled audience, an abled audience or both.
Lots of things, actually, that could look like signs of Munchausen’s By Internet to an outsider are actually very typical parts of being disabled. Someone mentioned illnesses “piling up” as though that ought to raise suspicion, when in reality, 1. Lots of conditions are comorbid with one another, so plenty of people have multiple and/or changing diagnoses and 2. Once you’re under the care of a certain healthcare team or similar and you’ve been diagnosed with one thing, it’s way more likely you’ll be tested for or could raise concerns about other things. Dr. Dickhead, who coined the term Munchausen’s By Internet, also lists “miraculous recoveries” as a sign of MBI, which frustrates me since “miraculous” can be so subjective, and sometimes bodies really do just glitch badly and then figure themselves out. Moreover, it highlights “clones” who apparently imitate disabled people so closely that “they get the same chair, the same colour service dog”, but listen. Wheelchairs are very expensive, and I personally wouldn’t want to choose one without checking out the opinions of people who already own one. Service dogs, whilst being very very good boys and girls, do not come in a huge range of colours to begin with, so statistically you’re pretty likely to see two people with a service dog of the same colour (you tit). The whole documentary feels like, regardless of its host, it has been put through a very particular lens that just cannot capture the nuances of being disabled, let alone being disabled online, because that diverts from the bit where disabled people are naughty lazy fakers. (It also feels like this should have been an hour long, partly for this reason and partly just based on the choppiness and the half-arsed interviews that answered like two questions.)
The investigation into the actual twats doxxing people for being disabled wrong was, in my view, less prominent than the discussion on faking/MBI itself, but it was also very “both-sidesy”, interviewing a moderator for one of the subs where doubters cluster together to try and find signs of faking, and finding that she considered it “a failed experiment” rather than something that could cause actual harm. Quite tellingly, she also said, “Sometimes we forgot we were dealing with human beings,” and acknowledged that “there is a line” but neglected to define where it might be. It seems like parts of the documentary are defending others’ right to scepticism, which, y’know, whatever, but that also means they’re implicitly defending behaviours that make others’ scepticism the problem of disabled people. Public internet forums debating whether or not you’re actually ill will always be hurtful, and sometimes dangerous (I convince myself I’m not disabled on a near-daily basis anyway; I don’t need any encouragement to stop taking my antipsychotics).
The thing is, this documentary does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in a world where we know that chronic conditions are underdiagnosed, especially among minority groups like women, POC, LGBT+ people etc., and it will be viewed by the people who have the power to provide or withhold these diagnoses and the treatment one could subsequently receive. It will be viewed by nosy and ableist next-door neighbours who will make you feel unsafe claiming benefits in your own home in case they glimpsed you in the garden last week. It exists in a world where the disbelieving of disabled people is already causing suffering and deaths, so maybe it’s clear why I’m angry about this documentary, which suggests that disabled people should be disbelieved.
I’m angry that they used Jessica’s image without her permission. I’m angry that they then said that “big-name influencers” like her had declined to be part of the documentary “because they’re afraid of being targets”, when Jessica states clearly on her Twitter that her motivation for declining was the ethical implications of the premise, and I suspect that was the case for many of these “big-name influencers”. Mostly, though, I’m angry that this exists. I’m angry that this was made and aired, and that whoever made those decisions either didn’t care, or didn’t care to learn, how it might affect IRL disabled people. I feel betrayed that the host was disabled but didn’t seem to bring any nuance to the table regarding disability, and was clearly there to portray “both sides”, not to advocate for other disabled people. I’m angry that it was weirdly short, so it gave only a very brief overview of campaigns of organised harassment, which are both fascinating to me as a linguist and terrifying to me as a disabled queer. I’m angry that most of the people featured in this doc were white, and that the focus was so heavily on physical disability, and a whole bunch of other things. And I’m hurt, because I feel like actual humans chose views and ratings over my actual wellbeing.
The documentary did a couple of things I didn’t hate, though! The host used they/them pronouns for a nonbinary interviewee, instead of misgendering them or carefully avoiding using any pronouns at all. She also did acknowledge that disabilities and medical interventions affect everyone differently, and what might hold true for her is not necessarily true for others. I liked some of the cool projection effects they used.
…that’s about it.
So, should you watch this wildly irresponsible and/or directly malicious documentary? Honestly, if you’re disabled, I wouldn’t recommend it – you won’t learn anything new, you’ll just be reminded how many people think you’re a liar and just how unsafe disabled people are in the world. If you’re not disabled, it might be worth watching just to know what discourse is floating around about disabled people, so that you’re positioned to be a better ally and advocate… but really, it’s not even terribly interesting, so maybe you’re better off reading reviews of it (like this one! But read multiple! I don’t represent every single disabled person!) and not giving the BBC the views. I can only really recommend it to people who, like me, sometimes want or need to get recreationally angry at the TV and who can’t find anything more infuriating on iPlayer.
I’m not here to tell you what to do, but if you want to complain about any aspect of this documentary, you can get in touch with the BBC by clicking here. If you want to support your local angry disabled person, you can buy me a coffee through Ko-Fi here. If you’d like to see some calming pictures of kittens, click here.