What is a ‘disability’?

Several writers and organizations have tried to make a distinction between physical aspects of disability and socially created limitations. Ann Shearer uses the terms ‘disability’ and ‘handicap’ in this way, suggesting that disability must be taken as given, but handicap is something that is imposed on that disability to make it more limiting then it must necessarily be. The extent to which a disability is a handicap depends on a number of factors such as a type of job a person has, the services that exist to help, the attitudes of society and the personality of the person with the disability. Ann Shearer illustrates this point by arguing that not being able to run for a bus wouldn’t be a handicap if buses waited for the passengers. However, many disabled people find a term ‘handicap’ offensive because of its historical association with begging and charity. A similar distinction can be made using the term

‘impairment’ to refer to the physical dimension and ‘disability’ as the term that incorporates the socially created aspects.

These distinctions are important because they reflect differing ways of thinking about disability. On the one hand, there is a medical model of disability, which focuses on the individual and physical conditions (impairments). A social model of disability takes the focus away from the individual and looks at disabling environments – ways in which society creates disabilities.

The definition, adopted by Oliver and Barnes, suggests that the term disability refers to:

the disadvantage or restriction caused by a contemporary social organization which takes no or little account of people who have…impairments and thus excludes them from the mainstream of social activities.

Needs vary but may include financial support, special educational facilities, sheltered employment, support, help in making social contacts, and aids and help in the practicalities of daily life. Often the greatest problem is not the impairment itself, but other people’s attitudes which may then be internalised by the sufferer.

In the following extract, a woman with multiple sclerosis explains how she felt about categories of normality after the onset of the disease:

I was confused; I still felt fundamentally the same. My body was different, I know that all right, but inside it was me. Normality is after all what you know. The male who is very short is normal to himself, it’s other people who make him aware of an ‘abnormality’. The ugly female is ‘normal’ to herself, it’s the others who make her ‘abnormal’. ’Normality’ and ‘abnormality’ are socially defined. Disability can and sometimes does interfere with the practical running of a life, but it is the reaction of and nonaction of society which causes

disablement. There is no such thing as THE DISABLED, there are just people.

On leaving hospital and finding the mantle of ‘disabled’ places firmly upon my unwilling shoulders I entered a world which was alien, absurd and ultimately defeating. My weak grasp on my identity was no real match for the massed forces of society who firmly believed themselves as ‘normal’ and myself just as firmly as ‘abnormal’. I found myself inhabiting a stereotype. I became my illness.

(By Y. Pat, Mastering Social Welfare.)