I know why many of us that live with a disability and/or mental illness are reluctant to disclose that to potential partners. As someone who lives with cerebral palsy as well as OCD and panic disorder, I'm extremely familiar with rejection and the fear of rejection because of those things about myself. There is still a stigma around both disability and mental illness that quietly says we're too much work, and that stigma can make disability and mental illness a deal breaker for some potential partners. However, even knowing that disability and mental illness might be deal breakers for a potential partner, I would still disclose those things about myself as early as possible.
Sure, it can be scary to tell a potential partner these things because they might decide they no longer want to pursue a relationship with us. But, let's be honest, someone choosing up front not to pursue a relationship with us because of those things is going to be better for us because they obviously wouldn't be able to be as kind and patient as we needed them to be on the bad days, which would have negatively affected our mental health anyway. It's better to let the people that aren't good for us weed themselves out before we're emotionally invested.
Also, just from a practical point, by keeping our disability and/or mental illness from a potential partner and entering into a relationship with them, we've basically ensured that we're going to have an unpleasant time in that relationship. A partner can't help us or accommodate us if we don't let them know that we need that from them. This is going to possibly put us in danger of ending up in situations that we shouldn't be in or literally can't be in without unpleasant consequences related to our disability or mental health because our partner didn't know about our mental health or disability limitations.
For our partner, when they find out that we live with a disability and/or mental illness that we didn't tell them before they agreed to be in a relationship with us, it could damage the relationship. Finding out that we kept such important information from them like some dirty little secret is likely going to make our partner feel hurt, lied to, and even betrayed and that big secret will more than likely break the trust we've worked to build in the relationship. It may even leave them wondering what other important things we've kept from them.
Each partner needs to be able to give consent to enter into a relationship, like informed consent is required before any procedure or research. A relationship is basically a contract between two people that has terms and conditions that apply (usually called their deal breakers and boundaries). Just like with any contract, people have to know ALL the terms, conditions, and risks of that contract before they enter into it, or the contract is no good. Mental health and disability are part of the terms and conditions that a potential partner needs to know about before they can give the required informed consent to enter into the relationship contract.
I'll end with this: Finding good, healthy relationships can be difficult for everyone, but it can be especially difficult for those of us that live with disability and/or mental illness, which can often make us want to hide those details about ourselves from our potential partners. We really shouldn't hide those things from our potential partners. Giving them all the "terms and conditions" is so important because this allows our partner to give actual informed consent to try out the relationship with us, and it allows us to select a partner who is willing to make the necessary room in the relationship to accommodate our disability and/or our bad mental health days to (hopefully) ensure the relationship is fun and healthy for everyone involved.
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