Health is More Than Physical

I was on the phone just a moment ago while at work, talking with a prospective tenant when the maintenance man overheard me describe the apartment management's age restriction policy: Minimum of age 62 or 55 with a disability. When I hung up, he chirped, "Unless it's a mental disability!" And laughed.

I stared at him for a moment, then informed him that our policy is, in fact, inclusive of the mentally disabled, to which he laughed again, said "I know," and wandered off.

Really? Some people genuinely find that funny? Oh, wait, they do.

For a person to be 100% healthy, zie must be both physically and mentally hale. If someone is perfectly physically fit but has debilitating mental illness, then zie is not healthy. It is terribly bigoted to even joke about invisible disability - mental or otherwise - as invalid, because it is marginializing to the people who have to live with it every day, not to mention the very existence of such jokes bolsters the negative stigma of having a mental illness:



Transcript after the jump.