The ‘High Functioning’ Myth

personal essay. how one label shaped the course of my mental healthcare for nearly two decades.

Photo by Mitch on Unsplash

My first experience with the term ‘high-functioning’ as a disease characteristic happened when I was a teen. However mundane the term itself might seem, that label has taken years of recovery and extensive academic research for me to fully understand. It has powerfully shaped my life with severe mental illness. Such functionally-based terminology exists within the world of disability and mental health and is often a relatively reliable metric for clinicians to track.

In the context of the social model of disability, what constitutes a person’s right to membership in the disability community is often directly linked to one’s ability to ‘function’ in daily life; these differentiations are reflected and reified by cultural perceptions of how disability and mental illness are supposed to ‘look’ to people in various roles adjacent to the person with disability: clinicians, family members, loved ones, educators, employers.

I have struggled to navigate my illness for two decades with this internal schema of myself as a high-functioning mentally ill person. It has propelled me to excel in my recovery and rebuild my life; and the ensuing exceptionalism has negatively influenced my sense of self…