How one mental health advocate is embracing community when it comes to disability and mental health

JILL KING, CO-FOUNDER OF THE STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES ADVOCACY GROUP, DISCUSSES DISABILITY PRIDE, COMMUNITY CARE’S TRANSFORMATIVE IMPACT, AND WHAT GIVES HER HOPE FOR THE FUTURE

By Kristina Benoist

Through her work with the Students with Disabilities Advocacy Group (SDAG), Jill King has been instrumental in fostering a space for disabled students to unite, advocate, and find strength in shared struggles on her Georgia Southern University campus.

Jill's commitment to amplifying marginalized voices is a testament to the potential for change. We sat down with Jill to hear more about what led her to this advocacy work and how she’s impacting the disability community on her campus — and eventually campuses around the country.

IDONTMIND (IDM): How are you today? How’s your mental health?

Jill King (JK): I'm doing alright today. I've been kind of having a rough time anxiety and depression lately, but today's been good. I was able to do some organizing work today, which I really enjoy, so I've been good!

IDM: If you don't mind sharing, I'd love to hear a little about your mental health journey.

JK: Yeah, of course. So throughout my teenage years, I was in intensive therapy. I was diagnosed with ADHD, and it was definitely the root of therapy growing up. I've kind of always been in and out of therapy since I was probably eleven and I'm 22 now. But I became disabled and really started identifying with disability when I was 18. I developed chronic pain and then I lost my vision when I was 20. And I would say disability has definitely impacted my mental health in a lot of ways. And not just negatively. Certainly, I would say chronic pain has impacted my anxiety a lot.

But on the good side of things, the community I've been able to find through disability has impacted my mental health in really positive ways. Just finding a community for myself and opening up conversations around mental health and disability has been huge. There are a lot of things that were uncomfortable to talk about around disability and mental health, so you're not supposed to talk about them. But the older I got, the more I was like, 'Why are we not talking about something that clearly everybody's experiencing on some level? It doesn't make sense to not talk about it.' It doesn't make sense to not come together and with that camaraderie and help one another out. I've learned so much about community care along the way and I really love community care because of that authenticity.

IDM: Do you feel like that, um, that community has kind of naturally existed for you? Or do you feel like you've had to create that on your own?

JK: When I initially became disabled, I didn't have any community. It was something that I had to seek out, and I've been building that through time. That's been a big part of my advocacy work, just trying to build that community. I knew how essential it was for me and I feel like the people that I'm working with would agree that it's been something positive for them. That's enough for me to feel good about it.

IDM: Speaking of, tell me a little bit about your disability advocacy work.

JK: Yeah, for sure. So we're the Students with Disabilities Advocacy Group (SDAG). We've just got one more piece of paperwork before and we're an official nonprofit. We were started on my college campus, Georgia Southern, in 2021. I was still pretty freshly disabled at the time. At that point, I didn't have a community at all, but I went seeking out other disabled students on my campus. We're one in four statistically, so there was no way there weren't other disabled students on my campus.

We're a grassroots and peer support based nonprofit. While we're not certified peer support specialists, I would say it's really based on the philosophy that you see in peer support. The idea that there's nothing about us without us and building camaraderie amongst your community so that we can work together and take each other in. It's been really good to see it grow over time. It was founded by myself and my best friend, Madeline Ryan Smith.

Within SDAG, everybody has different perspectives, but we're able to find common ground. I'm not disabled in the same way someone else is, but we have a common struggle. We have common issues that we're trying to face. Why can't we work on them together? Now that we're becoming a nonprofit, we're going to be slowly expanding to other universities starting chapters at other places. Because they know their community best — I wouldn't have wanted someone not at Georgia Southern to start this group. I knew my community and they know their community. And I think utilizing this pride that we do have in disability has been really great to start these conversations and expand change on our campus.

And the more I interact with campus, and just this community in general, there are so many people who have disabilities but don't really identify that way or don't see community in that way that I think could find real benefit from it. So I think that's part of what we've been able to do.

IDM: How would you say that disability and mental health intersect?

JK: I feel like when it comes to disability and mental health, we're seeing a lot of open discussions and seeing people not hesitate to talk about their experiences. There's been such openness and vulnerability, and that's been really powerful. Especially when it comes to disability. I know whenever we're talking about our lived experiences, you find everyone saying, 'I've definitely been there.' Even if you don't have the same disability, you're experiencing those same things. It all really comes from the same place..

IDM: What’s your biggest dream for SDAG as you continue to grow?

JK: Currently we only have three people on staff and no one's getting paid. So obviously one of the things is that I want to pay people for this excellent work that they're already doing. But when we first started, we really wanted to create a scholarship for disability advocates on campuses. I want to be able to give people money to fund whatever passion project they have at their chapter. I want to be able to build a larger alumni network. So let's say you're moving somewhere and you need to find a job, you could reach out to someone in the alumni network to help guide you. I just really want to build this community so that we can better support one another.

I love disabled people. They're my favorite people, and if I can and am able to, I want to bring disabled people into every single room. And that's something that over time we're going to implement: How can we get disabled people everywhere? How can we get these perspectives everywhere? Not only are they valuable because they're unique, but they're inherently valuable. This inaccessible society we live in has kind of forced us to creatively build solutions to problems. You know, I think the best problem solvers I know are people with disabilities.

This community care is really impactful. I lost my vision over the course of six months. It was really sudden — and it would've been traumatic no matter how it ended up — but because I already had community in SDAG, it wasn't nearly as devastating as it could have been. It was something that I was able to embrace, something I was able to cope with, and something I was able to understand in a better way than I would've without this community.

IDM: What do you think is the biggest challenge we need to overcome when it comes to mental health as a whole — and more specifically about disability and mental health?

JK: There's so much to it, but I think part of it really is the systems we have in place right now. They're not created with disabled people in mind. Before the Americans with Disabilities Act 33 years ago, the idea of me — a blind and fully disabled person — being about to finish my undergraduate degree and get my grad school paid for wouldn't have happened. None of that would've happened. Sometimes, when I'm on campus, I'm very aware that I wasn't originally meant to be here.

With our work now, the goal is to create space to say that yes, we do belong here. Our perspectives are valuable. I think bringing in disabled people and having disabled people in leadership is one step we need to take to fix these systems and understand how we can make them better for everybody involved.

IDM: What’s one thing that gives you hope about mental health?

JK: I had a Georgia Southern alumni reach out to me a couple of weeks ago. They said that they were GSU alumni and they said that they were really proud of our work, because it was what they needed when they were in college. And I cried. Every now and then, as an advocate, you'll have one of those days where it's like, 'Does my work really matter?' And then you get a message like that. That's enough for me to feel validated in this work. It's just really rewarding. And the farther along that we get with the nonprofit process, the more excitement we see from different people about starting a chapter on their campus. The fact that we're seeing this drive at all just makes me very hopeful. I know I am not the only young person who has a lot of opinions about disability and wants to make some noise about it. Gen Z is just so incredibly motivated. I feel like we're seeing just a new wave of disability justice advocates and that alone gives me a lot of hope for what we can see moving forward.

IDM: So what’s next for you and your work?

JK: I'll be finishing up my undergrad in the spring and then I'm hoping to go to a graduate counseling program. Alongside starting new SDAG chapters, we’ll be building a Faculty Advisory Board and Alumni Network.

Beyond SDAG, I would really love to create a nonprofit focused on disability and mental health — on the micro and macro level. I'd love to focus on having disabled therapists work with disabled clients. Cultural competency is needed in other marginalized communities, and I see it with disability too. This community is very unique and I think it can be very validating to go into therapy and see someone who understands your lived experience. So I would love to start some sort of nonprofit initiative to have disabled therapists work with disabled people.

That's the long-term goal. So far, I've been able to do this macro community work and it's been really healing. I never expected to be this passionate about it. When SDAG first started, people would call me an advocate, and I had no concept of what that meant. I didn't understand why I was being called that. We founded SDAG because it was what our community needed, and I feel like I tripped into advocacy work along the way. Everyone in SDAG leadership has lived experience in mental illness, disability, or chronic illness. And I think valuing that has been really important. That's where we see a lot of power.