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Who is handicapped?

The broad nature of the "handicap" concept in ordinary speech means that people with various kinds of functional disabilities are referred to as handicapped. They include the mentally retarded, people with seeing and hearing disabilities, the mobility-disabled, people with chronic or long-term illnesses, the mentally ill, and people with multiple disabilities. We also refer to people as being handicapped in particular contexts, such as the vocationally handicapped.

There are an estimated 1.5 million disabled people in Sweden. This should be seen in relation to our population, which is now approximately 8.3 million. The figure on the number of disabled is very uncertain, however. It increases or decreases depending on how we assess impairments of physical and mental abilities and how we define the standards to be fulfilled.

As for the numbers who are classified as disabled solely on the basis of injury or illness, we usually say that about 80,000 are mentally retarded, and of these roughly 35,000 are registered under the Act on Provisions for Mentally Retarded Persons. An estimated 70,000 people have impaired vision. About 330,000 have impaired hearing. The number of mobility-disabled people is put at roughly 380,000 and about 120,000 of them use technical aids to move about. People whose working capacity is reduced as the result of long-term illness are believed to number approximately 600,000.

As mentioned above, the way of defining disabilities affects these figures. There is no comprehensive report on the occurrence of disabilities in Sweden. Attempts have been made to obtain such information in connection with the national census. They have failed. The estimates that are made are based on nat39ional statistical studies of people's health and living conditions. Other figures are based on the number of people with disabilities who are registered in particular contexts. This applies, for instance, to the nationwide health check-up given to all children aged 4, and to the statistics kept by the National Labor Market Administration regarding job applicants with disabilities. As for the mentally retarded, all of those receiving the care available to them by law are registered. The disabled people's organizations provide additional data on which we can base our estimates.

The available data does not tell us much about trends. On the one hand, we can admittedly observe that medical progress is reducing the incidence of disabilities caused by specific diseases. Polio, for example, has now been entirely eradicated in Sweden. At the same time, the number of disabled people tends to rise because they survive longer than before, as a result of better methods of treatment and other medical efforts. In addition, a growing number of people are injured in traffic accidents or in other kinds of mishaps directly related to social developments. The decline in the number of people now becoming disabled thanks to better medical care and other factors is thus reduced or even perhaps outweighed by other factors that increase the number of disability cases. As a consequence, we do not really know whether the number of disabled people in Sweden is rising or falling.

Existing data merely indicates the people who have a disability or handicap. It tells little about the number of people living in a handicap situation. Aside from handicapped people themselves, many relatives or friends are affected by such a situation. The disabled and the handicapped are thus not an inconsequential minority. What we refer to in everyday speech as "handicap issues" affect most of the people in Sweden in some way. Only a small number of people can be regarded as spending their lives without any contact whatsoever with disabilities or handicaps, either their own or those of other people.

In describing what it is like to be a disabled person in Sweden, different points of departure may be used. One is to try and see whether (and in what respects) the situation of disabled people is the same as that of other people, very broadly speaking. This implies examining whether disabled people partake of the Swedish standard of living under reasonable conditions.