Blog/2026-02-16/Are Mental Conditions Disabilities?
Apparently 38 percent of students at Stanford have at least one disability[1]. Now, the Atlantic alleges, discreetly and in a sideways manner, that a large number of doctors who have set diagnostic criteria, administrators that co-operated with them, and then medical professionals in the field are all committing medical malpractice in assigning healthy people disabilities at their request so that they can do better in tests. If this is the case, then a lot of doctors are performing a lot of fraud and that some large number of Stanford students are also routine liars[2].
But a thing we should do is consider the alternative: that mental conditions we label illnesses are not actual disabilities. Perhaps, in fact, they are advantages and the accommodations should be for the people that do not have these conditions. Take, for instance, the fact that the CDC says that 21% of children have been diagnosed with a mental illness[3]. Stanford students, on the other hand, have nearly twice as much representation from that group[1], and Stanford is notoriously elite. If we had seen that ratio among neurotypical children, we would have concluded that some massive advantage accrues to them. Take, for instance, the case of left-handedness in antagonistic sports (where you play someone else, unlike say shooting):
Higher concentrations of left-handed athletes in higher echelons provide clear evidence for a link between left-handedness and athletic success, going beyond what traditional rank-independent analyses of (over)representation alone suggest. While our distributional data are compatible with the widely accepted [Negative Frequency-Dependent Advantage hypothesis], we have also raised the question of whether left-handers’ performance edge might additionally involve frequency-independent factors, as suggested by the often-overlooked [innate-superiority hypothesis]. Importantly, our findings do not allow us to favour one explanation over the other. The underlying causes are potentially multifactorial, involving both rarity-related and possibly frequency-independent factors, and require further targeted research to be disentangled.
— Royal Society Open Science[4]
Importantly, the mere existence of the disparity proves left-handedness advantage (with similar numbers in base prevalence vs. in these sports). In fact, this is so accepted that most science has moved on to studying why rather than whether. We must surely conclude that the numbers show the same for these mental conditions[5]. It's time we shifted accommodations in higher-education from the neuro-divergent to the neuro-typical to compensate for the disadvantages the latter face in going through life as revealed through the disparate impact experienced in college admissions.
Notes[edit]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Horowitch, Rose (December 2, 2025). "Accommodation Nation". The Atlantic. Retrieved February 16, 2026.
- ↑ When someone says they went to some university, a common conversation question is "Oh cool! What did you study?". Perhaps Stanford students will be asked "Oh cool! Which disability did you have?". Though perhaps not since that's fairly dangerous considering it would compromise later hiring decisions which require a veil of ignorance on disabilities, fraudulent or genuine.
- ↑ "Data and Statistics on Children's Mental Health". Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC. June 5, 2025. Retrieved February 16, 2026.
- ↑ Simon, Tim; Loffing, Florian; Frasnelli, Elisa (1 September 2025). "Prevalence of left-handers and their role in antagonistic sports: beyond mere counts towards a more in-depth distributional analysis of ranking data". Royal Society Open Science. 12 (9): 250303. doi:10.1098/rsos.250303.
- ↑ I don't feel confident calling things that cause one to have better outcomes in society illnesses. Certainly society and medicine have labeled these things such, but they do not meet the condition of disorder if the absence of them leads to worse outcomes.
