Women in Philosophy: Ask a Senior Woman in Philosophy About Disclosing A Disability

by Audrey Yap

The Women in Philosophy series is running a mini-series called “Ask a Senior Woman Philosopher.” The first installment was posted last August, the second in December. If you have a question for which you would like advice from a senior woman philosopher but don’t have someone to ask or don’t feel like you can ask the senior women philosophers you know, send your question to the series editor, Adriel M. Trott, at trotta [at] wabash [dot] edu. Questions will be anonymized and a suitable respondent found. 

Should I disclose that I have been diagnosed as bipolar to my committee before taking my qualifying exams? I have a mild diagnosis, but I am concerned with how it might affect me in my preparations for the exam and my performance in the exams, especially the oral portion. I have had significant success in graduate school as well as in my life and work before attending graduate school in philosophy, so I know that I am capable of doing good work. I am not sure how my condition will affect me during my exams and long-term in my career, but I worry that disclosing will have negative effects. Should I be open about being bipolar to mentors, supervisors, employers, and colleagues? Can you suggest strategies for disclosing that would be most conducive to good relationships and to my success?

My lived experience related to disability has been as someone with diagnosed mental health conditions. These days, as someone holding a tenured position, I am fairly open about the fact that my ability to live up to daily workplace expectations is conditioned on taking my medication regularly. My openness in this respect is relatively new, though. During my graduate and undergraduate education, I disclosed very little, and am honestly not sure about the extent to which it would have helped me to do so.

Disclosing one’s status with respect to disability is always going to be fraught territory in an ableist society. There are several features of academic philosophy – perhaps academia in general – that further complicate the disclosure of diagnoses related to mental health. The Dialogues on Disability series, the Disabled Philosophers blog, and the Blog of the APA, have documented many stories in this respect, but there are many good reasons to worry that a philosophy department is a hostile place for disabled individuals whether or not they identify themselves as such to others. (Note: the language of disability is complicated, without a single uniform preference for referring terms among advocates in the target group. Since I have to make a choice, then, I use “disabled people” rather than “people with disabilities,” having been convinced against a conception of disability as a personal attribute or property) In environments in which emotions are frequently portrayed as liabilities, or barriers to proper inquiry, admitting to a diagnosis of a mood disorder or something similar may amount to claiming a lack of proper philosophical temperament. Not, of course, that this would be made explicit by one’s mentors and peers, but ableist biases seem likely to creep in to many parts of the evaluation process.

Cynical as it might seem, then, I would generally recommend junior scholars to err on the side of caution and not disclose, though a lot of factors make this recommendation defeasible. In my own case, the only times when disclosure has been helpful have been when I required something concrete like an extension, accommodation, or concession. In all of those cases, I was relatively non-specific about the nature of the medical event that had interfered with my work. So if there is a concrete outcome like that that might stem from disclosing one’s status, then that might make it worthwhile. For example, if it might result in a way to arrange comprehensive exams that would make them more manageable, such as having flexible scheduling, that might be a reason to speak to your committee. If you have a good reason to feel as though your committee would be supportive, however, and would ensure that your graduate school requirements were accessible, that might also be a reason to speak to one or all of them even without a concrete outcome in mind. It’s often hard to know, though, how others will react, and how that knowledge will lead them to treat you moving forward – whether it will lead them to (likely unintentionally) treat you as less capable or more difficult. You might also consider the position of the faculty member you’re speaking to. Faculty with similar relevant experiences might have more helpful suggestions or strategies than those with perhaps more institutional power but less situated knowledge.

You might also want to be very clear on just how much you are obligated to disclose, if you choose to. You may have a student disability resource centre that can help you work out such things, or counseling services that might be able to help you communicate with your instructors. Instructors, after all, do not generally have the relevant professional experience to understand your circumstances and needs, so don’t feel obligated to treat them as such.

All of that sounds a bit discouraging for junior folks, I know. But academia does have more than its share of institutional ableism built in, and there’s no easy or clear way to navigate it. So what I want to address next are ways in which more senior scholars, particularly those in mentoring or supervisory relationships, can try to improve things.

It might be useful for institutions to consider for whom their policies and procedures are made. That is, when we look at pathways through our educational processes such as the route to candidacy for PhD students, we might also consider what assumptions we are making about the students who will be taking this route. Will students ideally be participating in activities outside of typical working hours, meaning that they do not have too many obligations or requirements outside of those hours? Are any provisions built in for students who might face health challenges, and what mechanisms might there be to ensure that students who take a leave of absence do not fall through the administrative cracks? Comprehensive exams might be written in a single long sitting, but there might be alternatives such as take home formats that may be more accessible for some. Rigid scheduling or a lack of breaks might be needlessly prohibitive. A student with mental health diagnoses might not need to disclose their status if they are simply allowed to choose, say, the exam format and timing that works best for them, in consultation with their committee. Universal Design principles when applied in learning are often considered with respect to classroom environments, but nothing prevents us from considering the extent to which our general program requirements, tenure expectations, etc, take up a flexible and equitable approach.

Institutions will often give students a picture of who they are supposed to be as a philosopher by means of their requirements as well as their general departmental culture. One of the things I’ve found most psychologically damaging in academic philosophy is the extent to which it emphasizes genius and the extent to which one is a star, or likely to become a star philosopher. This is often implicit in the ways in which we talk about other philosophers and value them (or fail to value them). Graduate students and junior faculty who are privy to some portion of hiring decisions will often see the extent to which potential job candidates are spoken of in terms of their star potential. Indeed, I often find the clearest indications of what my own colleagues value in the discipline when I am on hiring committees with them.

There is plenty of reason to believe that the culture of genius is particularly damaging to members of underrepresented groups, or people most vulnerable to stereotype threat. It can vastly undermine one’s sense of self-worth – and I don’t happen to know any disabled philosophers whose sense of self-worth is so inflated that undermining it would be a net positive. Sometimes an emphasis on stardom and hyperproductivity is defended on the basis that it improves philosophical quality. Research superstars, we might think, are paradigms of philosophical success, where such superstars are often characterized by a high number of publications in top-tier journals. They might also have personality traits associated with smartness, such as being quick with responses to questions, and have an easy time negotiating adversarial settings. When one’s mental life is already considered atypical, it can be more difficult to identify with this image of philosophical success.

But why uphold this image of productivity and genius? Perhaps this is indeed what some of us value in our professional colleagues, but not all of us. Further, given what we know about the lack of fit between stereotypical images of genius and members of underrepresented groups, perhaps what we are valuing is not philosophical quality, simpliciter. Perhaps instead, we are valuing a certain vision of philosophical quality as it is exemplified by those who occupy positions of relative social privilege. Some may only value the contributions of philosophers with diagnosed mental illness, disabled philosophers generally, or indeed philosophers from underrepresented groups, insofar as they can achieve a specific version of philosophical success (despite the fact that this view of success was not developed with them in mind). If that’s the case, then best to be explicit about it. This seems to me to be an excessively narrow vision of the discipline, and one that would surely disqualify it from any remaining claims to getting at universality. But I think it is up to anyone with power to shape our discipline, at least insofar as it is realized within our own departments, institutions, or organizations, to make their stance on such things clear.

What that means, then, is that anyone who does have some measure of social and institutional power should consider who and what their practices might be excluding. And if there are sources of knowledge or types of people that our common practices and policies exclude, then we should have good reasons to think that they ought to be excluded. It strikes me that there is no good reason to exclude disabled philosophers from the profession, and in fact that there are positive reasons to include work by people with a wide range of lived experiences, which clearly includes disability. But this means that careful reviews of institutional practices will be required in order to understand what barriers they might be posing and for whom. So while I advised junior scholars not to disclose their diagnoses unless they have very good reasons to do so, I hope these policy and practice reviews (among other measures) will eventually make such advice obsolete.

*I owe thanks to several people for extremely helpful discussions throughout the writing of this post. Their names will be left anonymous, as most of them are people who identify as having mental health challenges in some form or other, and as such I want to protect their privacy. I think, though, that they will know who they are. I could not do work like this without the intellectual and emotional support of people like them in my communities.

Audrey Yap is Associate Professor in the Philosophy department at the University of Victoria, in Canada. She is also the departmental graduate advisor and the person most likely to show students pictures of her excellent dogs. Her primary scholarly work is in social philosophy, particularly feminist and anti-oppressive epistemologies. She also teaches and trains in taekwondo and has recently taken up aerial circus arts.