A Brief Note On Breaking The Barriers Of Stigma

Individuals with a physical disability view disability culture in more personal and artistic contexts. Individuals with physical disabilities feel they construct a culture through encounters that shape individual identity and identity formation. They feel they have forged a group identity, share a common history of oppression and a common bond of resilience. Pride is a big part of their identity, and are very proud as people with disabilities. Therefore disability culture is a set of artifacts, beliefs, expressions created by disabled people themselves to describe their own life experiences. It is not primarily how they are treated, but what they have created (Darrow, 2013). They declare their membership within their social group, and recognize the objectifications they face, which oppresses them through social structures, individual attitudes and institutional practices. It should be recognized that they have a shared experience within society and the consequences of having a physical impairment result in a shared experience of oppression (Lawson, 2001).

Formerly, persons with disabilities were kept private and out of public view. In recent years, the number of people living with disabilities has increased due to longer life expectancy and advancement of medical treatments for life-threatening illness. With the transition of persons with a disabilities into more conventional lifestyles, they are now thriving in society. Disabled persons can be increasingly independent through an assisting device such a cane or wheelchair, though cultural barriers still exist between disabled and able-bodied persons.

What comes into one’s mind when they think of a disabled person? Most people feel pity and embarrassment, and feel these disabled people are nothing but useless. In “Disability,” writer Nancy Mairs discusses the experience of being a disabled person in a world focused on strong and healthy people. The danger in this single story is that people with disabilities are discriminated against and put away with forgotten care. Mairs states, how debilitated individuals are continually barred, particularly from the media. People with disabilities are the same as the average American person, but because they are disabled, they are seen as meaningless human beings and

I can no longer smell his sharp beer breath, detect the slurring in his words or feel the anger tightening my throat. But no matter how many times I wash them, I still can’t get the stench of my father’s cigarette smoke out of my clothes.

In the past, having a disability was seen as a physical imperfection. People with disabilities were treated as moral and social subordinates. We were trained that if a person had a disability they were not able to perform a task with the same ability as a normal person. They have been denied jobs for which they are highly qualified because they have been considered incompetent, or because employers were not comfortable with their presence in the workplace. Occasionally people with certain disabilities have been committed to institutions and facilities because people believed they were incapable of making decisions or caring for themselves or because people did not want to interact with them (Blanck, 2004).

Within society, there are very rare instances where we truly hear or understand the experience of an individual who is disabled from their own point of view. In fact, the majority of the time, we tend to hear about the experiences of able bodied individuals who have family members or friends with a disability and how they go about helping these individuals with the things they need. Moreover, the dominant ideology in society influences people to believe that these individuals are incapable of living a “normal” life and therefore, are incapable of achieving happiness. Both articles by Oliver (1990) and Ladd (2005) place their focus on the medicalization of disabilities and how able-bodied and able-minded individuals hold the power to medicalize

Historically, people with disabilities were seen as being unable to contribute to society and therefore were viewed as being dependent on others for care. The dependency that was created resulted in persons with disabilities being seen as unhealthy and defective (Neuhaus et al, 2014). In effort to care for people with disabilities, agencies such as Anixter have confined people with disabilities to buildings and kept them from becoming participating citizens in their natural communities.

Over the year’s perceptions and attitudes towards people with disabilities have varied from community to community. Approximately 50 million Americans with disabilities today lead independent, confident, and happy lives. There have been many advancements in healthcare and thus, most disabled individuals live within their community rather than an institution. For many centuries people with disabilities have been battling harmful stereotypes, ridiculous assumptions, and fear that they do not fit in.

The practice of othering within society has led to the exclusion of people with disabilities whom of which are portrayed within society as dependent, unattractive and abnormal individuals. There are two different geographical models in which disability has been modelled. The first defining disability as a medically orientated problem leaving one to seek assistance to conform to daily norms and the second model defining disability in terms of the types of impairments with the overall disabled society socially built around the public environment.

. Stigma circumventing psychological disorders is additionally due to observations that individuals with these symptoms are concretely arduous to treat and they often terminate treatment prematurely. Knowledge about this diagnosis, however, is vital to early detection and utilization of specialized therapeutic approaches. Dialectical Demeanor Therapy is one of the most recommended treatments and it consists of individual therapy, skills group, and phone counseling

In this essay I will attempt to explain people’s attitudes towards the person with disability, also about the causes due to which our society discriminates against them. Few of these reasons are stereotyping, psychological discomfort, lack of accommodation, paternalization & pity.

There are many stigmas, or misconceptions and misperceptions in our society which need to be shattered. I believe that one of the worse possible effects of stigma is that it causes those affected by psychological disorders, or mental illness, to crawl more deeply into themselves because it provokes a sense of shame. Stigma thrusts those suffering with mental illness into a sense of isolation, social exclusion, and discrimination. “Stigma can lead to discrimination … It may be obvious or direct … Or it may be unintentional or subtle…” (Staff). Stigma is often as big as the illness itself and I confess to having been a perpetuator of this dreaded thing, although not consciously aware and without the intent of furthering the harm of someone.

It doesn’t matter what you look like on the outside, it’s what’s on the inside that counts, but our society today lacks to understand that. In today’s time different is not accepted, people that are different are discriminated, looked down upon and usually picked on. People with disabilities are seen as different creatures by most people, the disabled don’t choose to be the way they are, but still our society alienates them. There are different types of disabilities, some type of disabilities are; mental disability, physical disability, learning disability and socializing disability. These disabilities are seen as weakness in our society that hence contribute to the stereotype that leads to the discrimination against the disabled.

Over the years, perceptions towards disability have been significantly changing as result of the long pathway the disable community has taken fighting for Civil Rights, inclusion and against discrimination. Unfortunately, this last one has not been totally accomplished yet. Barriers to social integration still exist in the society. Perhaps the greatest barrier is not the disability itself; is the attitude of people.

This week’s discussion dealt with Individuals and Disabilities. Over the years, people who have a “disability" have been subjected to prejudice and more. And the first way to diminish someone is through language, by using words or labels to identify a person as "less-than," as "the others—not like us," and so forth. Once a person has been identified this way, it makes