:   Can Being “Labelled” Harm You?

Title:   Can Being “Labelled” Harm You?

“Labels” can be useful things. For example, an assessment of a child considered by trained professionals, to be on the Autism Spectrum can be seen as a positive thing. The “label” may mean that the child gets the extra help needed.

However, by their very connotations labels can be sticky negative things. They can cling on from childhood into adulthood and into old age causing problems with our mental health

They can give different societies ‘hooks’ on which to hang their perception of different peoples’ place and value in the world. So, how does a society‘s “Labels” affect the life of someone who is categorised as deaf, blind, or suffering from mental illness. The latter might even be applied today to those who consider themselves gay or non-gender.

In the “olden” days when I was a child, society perceived a person’s “handicap” or label as a reflection of their intellect. For example, a blind person was considered limited in ability because of their disability. So basket weaving was the job for them.

Helen Keller turned that on its head.

I have a memory of a kind hearted optician who’s tut tutting and lamenting pity for my limited vision every time he tested my eyes used to drive me nuts. I wanted to kick him in a place where he’d have something else to pity other than my lack of sight. Of course, because of my label as ‘handicapped’ he could never imagine I could think such a thing. To him, in the mind-set of the day, I was as feeble minded as I was near sighted

There was a quote that was used to explain away why people born with learning disability such as dyslexia, left school and entered the workforce unable to read or write. It went something like this ‘We didn’t teach them because they couldn’t learn…”  In truth, they couldn’t learn because we didn’t teach them in a way they could learn.

The internal image we have of ourselves is formed layer by layer from the attitudes and perceptions reflected back to us like a mirror image from our family, friends and early educators. Their internalised beliefs about a person’s “label” lead them to think, act and behave towards a person in a certain way. What they reflect back help form an identity of who we are and of our place in society.

Our local National school was the first place I was made to understand where my place in society was to be. The Infant Class teacher took one look at my head of white hair and my squinting eyes moving about trying to make sense of the strange environment of the crowded classroom and put me in the last row at the back of the class – too far from the blackboard to see what she was writing on it.

By law, I had to be there but she didn’t have to waste time teaching me despite my obvious ability to keep up with the other fully sighted scholars, as we were called in those days.

Many years later, as a retired college lecturer I was writing my memoirs, I said to Dave, the course leader “Even as a child I knew there was more to me than what people saw in me.  Once the “label” of visually impaired was applied, my brain didn’t count. They simply couldn’t see past the moving eyes (nystagmus)) and my shock of white hair.”

It’s said, “There are none so blind than those who cannot see,”

When you don’t fit into society’s perception of your label or place in life it confuses people.  When, as a teacher I met people for the first time it wasn’t immediately obvious that I was visually impaired. And since most of the time I forget that I am I’d forget to mention it. When they realised I was the look on their faces said,” Really! You’re a real teacher!  Or, they’d literally step up nose -to-nose with me. I keep stepping back and they keep stepping up. It was sooo annoyingly funny.

What about the hidden labels. “Do you consider yourself to have a have a disability? “

Not ticking that box almost got me put off a Postgrad Dip in Counselling. Rob, the tutor, said “You are a deviant.”

“I’ve been called worse,” I joked, not sure if we were still talking about the psychological subject we had been discussing in class before the break, or talking about my being sight challenge, or because I hadn’t ticked the ‘disability’ box.

And yes, he was right. My inherited genes make me ‘deviant ‘under society’s sticky label.

It can only harm me if I internalise it and begin to live it.

Gemma Hill ©