FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
WRITER, STUDENTS SEEK TO CHANGE ATTITUDES ABOUT INVISIBLE ILLNESS
(KINGSTON, ON – March 8, 2010)
Award-winning journalist and writer Jason Reid will be a keynote speaker Wednesday night as part of Invisible Disability Awareness Week at Queen’s University.
Reid, most recently news manger at The Weather Network, now runs a company called Sick with Success, educating people and businesses about chronic illness while providing inspiration and tips on high performance careers. He has suffered from Crohn’s disease, a painful bowel condition, for more than 30 years and knows all too well the challenges that young people face with chronic illness.
“People don’t expect the young to be sick, and when they don’t look sick it makes it even more difficult for them to find understanding among their peers, teachers and eventually their employers,” said Reid.
Invisible Disability Awareness Week is sponsored by InvisAbilities a Queen’s club, which was founded by student Julie Harmgardt to bring attention to the issues facing young people with invisible illnesses such as Crohn’s disease, diabetes, asthma and many others.
“Doctors, friends and staff, have a hard time accepting the notion that someone ‘so young’ could be feeling so awful,” says Harmgardt who suffers from chronic pain due to an autoimmune disorder. “We should not have to look sick to have people believe us, offer their help and be supportive.”
Reid says discrimination against those with invisible illness can have serious effects on their lives and even keep them from getting needed medical treatment. “When I was younger, I was on medication that made me prone to kidney stones. There were a couple of times when I had an acute kidney stone attack and went to the emergency ward and was refused treatment for several hours. All the doctors could see was that I was young, thin and asking for pain relief. Both times they made the assumption I was a drug addict.”
Reid also brought up the case of Nathalie Blanchard, a thirty-year-old woman, from Quebec who had been diagnosed with severe depression, but had her disability payments revoked after the insurance company noted she had posted vacation photos of herself smiling on Facebook. They determined, based on the photos, that she was no longer ill.
The thing that struck Reid were the number of readers who wrote comments on the story saying the woman couldn’t possibly be sick. Their opinions were based solely upon how the woman looked in a photo.
“Making a mental-health diagnosis based on a photo is ludicrous, but the reality is that people think they can immediately spot someone who is sick based on what they see.”
Despite the physical and emotional challenges of his illness, Reid was still able to succeed in the competitive and demanding career of television journalism, his advice to students is to use the digital media they have grown up with to help change attitudes towards invisible illness.
“Whether it’s blogs, Facebook, Twitter, or other forms of digital communication, this generation has the tools to influence the opinions of huge numbers of people from around the world,” says Reid. “They can make it socially unacceptable to judge a person’s health based on looks. There may come a day when this sort of discrimination is frowned upon, much like racism is today.”
Reid singled out Harmgardt, as an example of the courage and determination needed to change people’s opinions about invisible illness. “When I was in university, the last thing I wanted to talk about was being sick. Young people today are of a different breed. They’ve grown up communicating to the world and they’ve also grown up with diversity. They are the key to helping us change these negative perceptions.”
Reid will be speaking Wednesday March 10th at 7:30pm at the Old Common Ground, John Deutsch University Centre at Queen’s.
For information on invisible illness you can visit www.sickwithsuccess.com
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