By EMILY WRIGHT
The words unity, equality and culture greet me every morning I walk to campus from my apartment. The word equality, painted on the wall of Vinson Hall’s parking lot, stands out for me each time, not because it is painted in red. Students with invisible disabilities and chronic illnesses tend to have a strange relationship with equality.
From my own personal experience, it can feel hard or unthought of to ask for more equal treatment. After all, I look physically well. However, the reality for students like me is more complicated than that. Accessibility at Northwestern remains to be seen as an issue.
Requests for change have been made all four years I’ve attended NWOSU, with little to show for it. Concerns about the reliability of elevators or lack of elevators and ramps for mobility aides, have been continuously mentioned as issues as it makes getting to classes an incredible struggle.
Using mobility aides becomes harder to do. In some cases, it can discourage students from using an aide on campus. For example, students can still walk around campus; it changes when longer distances, sudden changes in abilities and unsteady terrain make using a wheelchair, cane or other aide a necessity for students with invisible disabilities.
Options become further limited in certain buildings like Jesse Dunn and changing class locations to accommodate a student’s mobility aide can take weeks to complete. Students with invisible disabilities also experience not being believed and being labeled as dramatic.
People with such disabilities are often perceived as having less serious complications than those with visible disabilities, as you cannot look at us and know immediately what we struggle with. This leads to students feeling as if they cannot speak up or ask for assistance from friends, professors or administrators out of fear of not being believed.
One student told me about how they have fainted while preparing for classes on several occasions; with a few of these events causing them to be absent from class. They admitted that they do not email or inform professors when this happens to them out of embarrassment, or the lingering fear of not being believed. These students know that accommodations are offered and that they are allowed to seek them.
However, students with invisible disabilities typically do not seek them. This can be because of anxiety, of feeling they having to prove they are disabled and need assistance, or because attempts at getting accommodations goes nowhere. This can be caused by the college’s lack of resources to accommodate students or because accommodation is not seen as needed for some student’s cases.
In my opinion, I feel a separate administrative department could help students with disabilities, whether they be visibly or invisibly disabled. This department could advocate for students and help students with disabilities advocate for themselves. This department could specialize in all areas of disability, so the student body can be adequately supported by the college. This could help us in being more productive, feeling motivated and valued by our Northwestern family.