Disability is really a term widely used for the social condition recognised as caused by any sort of physical or mental impairment mainly identified through surgical procedure. Some are present at birth while other impairments occur at various stages of a person's life either as manifestations of genetic conditions or because the consequence of conflicts (e.g. war), and accidents. Examples are varying examples of blindness, deafness, speech impairments (dumbness) and loss of limbs. Chronic illnesses too ought to be put into this list. Usually prosthetic devices such as magnifying glasses, Braille, hearing aids, sign language, crutches, wheelchairs along with other similar aids have already been designed to ameliorate handicaps in living, experienced by disabled people.
Constitution of Disabled Peoples' International (1981) defines Impairment as 'the loss or limitation of physical, mental or sensory function on a long-term or permanent basis', with Disablement defined as 'the loss or limitation of opportunities to be a part of the standard life of the city on an equal level with others due to physical and social barriers'
Since all serious impairments giving rise to disability may actually stem from a recognised medical condition, historically, disability studies relied on a medical model centred almost solely on the average person. Following the medical model the disabled were segregated from 'normal' people and viewed as deficient, without self-efficacy, needing care. The disabled were defined by their deficiencies, in what they might not do, rather than by what they might do. Society at large made no attempt to adjust to certain requirements of the disabled, to integrate them, instead tending to isolate them in institutions or at home. Impairment was viewed as the issue, and the disabled were restricted to being passive receivers of medication, care, and targeted assistance through state intervention or charity. Even today, as befitting the medical model, disabled people are regarded as requiring rehabilitation. They're subject to negative stereotyping and prejudice by the rest of society. Further, the ubiquitous built environment imposes restrictions on their mobility, access to employment and recreation.
Mike Oliver (1996), an academic with first-hand connection with disability and what it entails, calls the medical model an 'individual model' creating a binary distinction between it and the social models which followed the Disabled People's Movement in the 1970s. Vic Finkelstein, another academic and Paul Hunt, an activist, were also involved in assisting to form the Union of the Physically Impaired against Segregation (UPIAS). Oliver fought against the 'medicalisation' of disability denying that there never was a 'medical model' of disability. Oliver believed that problems attendant on disability should not be regarded exclusively because the responsibility of the medical profession and other similar 'experts' who, from a position of power, start to see the problem as entirely located within the individual. For Oliver among others employed in the disability field around the 1970s disability was a social state rather than a condition. These pioneers were influenced by Marxist rhetoric much in evidence at that time.
The average person discourse on disability is allied to World Health Organisation pronouncements, for example, by the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health. It owed its existence to advances in science and medicine which placed disabled individuals into medical categories for the convenience of medical practitioners along with other medical researchers. This, though eminently practical and appropriate at that time, was later experienced by the disabled population being an oppressive situation. They felt themselves labelled, manipulated, and powerless vis-a-vis their own bodies and personhood.
There's inherently nothing wrong with impairments being initially identified and treated as a condition. Indeed, it is a necessary first step, especially when individuals require continuing, lifetime medical care. It really is when such treatment excludes or disregards the social environment, which to a large extent defines the parameters within which the disabled are expected to operate, that problems arise. It inevitably invites social exclusion and disadvantage, segregation and stigmatisation, that is the fundamental criticism contrary to the narrow medical model.
Still, you can find apologists for the medical style of disability. They regard as questionable Mike Oliver's denial that impairment has any causal correlation with the societal notion of disability. For them that is an 'oversocialized' and overly politicized view. Although he accepts that disability is both biologically and socially caused, he places 'more significant causal weight' on the former. They recognise the sociological significance of the body, but complain hat the social model suffers from 'somatophobia' due to an over-emphasis on the social context. Other researchers are keen to emphaise that there surely is social oppression at play in neuro-scientific disability.
Shakespeare and Watson (2002) stress that 'embodied states are highly relevant to being disabled'. They think that social model advocates 'over-egg the pudding' by stating that disability is entirely a creation of society rather than accepting that 'disability is really a complex dialectic of biological, psychological, cultural and socio-political factors, which can't be extricated' to any great extent. However, Carol Thomas (2004) is critical of anyone not recognising the importance of disabilism within their discussion of disability. She thinks they confine themselves to a 'commonplace meaning of disability' ignoring the much larger significance allied to similar concepts like racism, sexism and homophobia.
Vic Finkelstein, a pioneering academic and activist in neuro-scientific disability, himself disabled, was a refugee from apartheid South Africa where he previously been in prison for five years. Having been mixed up in civil and human rights movement in South Africa, he was immediately sensitised to the ghetto-like connection with the disabled in the UK. He saw that they were denied participation in the mainstream social and political life of the united states. One of Finkelstein's collaborators Paul Hunt, had been surviving in residential institutions (Cheshire Homes) from childhood and campaigned with other residents for a job in the management of such Homes. Following the medical model Cheshire Homes believed it had provided compensatory measures to meet up the needs of the disabled, but disabled activists like Finkelstein and Hunt saw it as oppression of a minority by society most importantly.
These activists saw the medical model because the default position of the disability 'industry' staffed by care managers, social workers, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, clinical psychologists and doctors. Disabled persons' powerless and socially inferior position was reinforced such circumstances, however sympathetic and dedicated these professionals were in undertaking their duties. It had been only following the establishment of UPIAS that the political landscape changed. UPIAS (1976) concluded that '... it is society which disables physically impaired people. Disability is something imposed along with our impairments by the way we have been unnecessarily isolated and exclude from full participation in society. Disabled people are therefore an oppressed group in society'.
Apart from the horrors of the Holocaust which enabled doctors to experiment on disabled victims, there is a minumum of one documented case of clinical abuse of disabled children in america. Known as the Willowbrook Experiment, in 1956 disabled children were deliberately infected with viral hepatitis to monitor progress of the condition over a lengthy amount of 14 years. Parents have been under great pressure to accede to it. It was also approved by the brand new York State Department of Mental Hygiene. To a big extent such extreme measures are no more evident, but you can see how disability have been a custodial discourse.
A good example of a drastic change in the medical model is that no more than four decades ago, the universally acclaimed and used Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) listed homosexuality as a mental illness. Psychiatrists and clinical psychologists practised aversion therapy (amongst others) to 'cure' these 'unfortunates'. In spite of objections from the few extreme right politicians and religious fanatics, it really is now accepted as a normal and positive variation of human sexuality. Indeed equal opportunity and human rights legislation have recognised the 'gay' community as a minority group. Some states even allow civil union and even marriage between same sex couples.
The way the society's views and treatment of the disabled have changed through the years is demonstrated by the exemplory case of Lord Nelson and President Roosevelt. Having an arm amputated and blind in one eye, 'the statue of Horatio Nelson defies modern infatuation with physical perfection by flouting his impairments.' He contrasts Admiral Nelson with the wheel-chair using wartime US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Unlike Nelson, he was created right into a modern culture where having an 'impairment' was supposed to directly 'disable' an individual. Therefore, a 'public statue of Roosevelt sitting in a wheel chair was unthinkable' So now we are offered a statue to a major USA public figure that takes care to cover up any evidence of his impairment. There will not be a call to erect a statue to an even more modern celebrity like Prof. Stephen Hawking, but one must grant that without the medical advances that recognise his impairments making it possible for him to receive the right medical treatment and continue living and working as he does, there would not be a social or academic role for him to fill with such distinction.
In Australia, a variation of the social model was referred to as the rights-based model of disability. As in the UK, disabled people as a group there sought a political voice. Such activism and advocacy has taken gains, but they admit that there are also limitations. Although as https://www.tebbyclinic.com/dot-exam/dot-physical-cost/ helped to bring about needed changes through legislation, it locks people into an identity thought as being members of a minority community. In this manner the conceptual barrier between 'normal' and 'abnormal' is maintained. Additionally, there are new challenges once the latest genetic and reproductive technologies add a larger proportion of the populace as carriers of 'bad' genes and unwittingly placed in the disabled category inviting discrimination and avoidance.
Four decades following the Cheshire Homes incident, we've the spectre of Remploy Ltd. a government owned factory network across the UK established in 1945 offering both employment, and employment placement services, to the disabled, being dismantled. Remploy have been producing or assembling a massive range of products in its 54 factories spread across the country. Towards the finish of the last century it even moved into service sector work. In 2009/10 Remploy placed 10,500 disabled people in jobs in a variety of sectors. This season the Coalition government has decided to close 36 Remploy factories making 1700 workers redundant (press reports). It really is unlikely that UPIAS would accuse Remploy as being in the business of segregating the disabled, but at some early point in a disabled person's life that kind of provision was always likely to have been necessary.
On doctrinaire grounds alone neither the medical model nor the social model would be privileged in explaining changes in circumstances such as those occurring now in the united kingdom as exemplified by the fate of Remploy Ltd.
Others in the field take somewhat of a middle ground. For them disability is a 'post-modern concept, because it is indeed complex, so variable, so contingent, so situated. It is at the intersection of biology and of agency and structure. Disability can't be reduced to a singular identity: this can be a multiplicity a plurality.' They assert that any social theory must include 'all the dimensions of disabled people's experiences: bodily, psychological, cultural, social, political, rather than claiming disability is either medical or social'. They found people unwilling to recognize themselves as disabled. They wished to see themselves as normal though different. Lots of people with learning difficulties won't be known as disabled.
People have many different identities. Those who do not accept being labelled disabled may admit several other identities as more salient. For example, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class or marital status. The social model developed in the 1970s is not any longer useful or valid. There needs to be a paradigm shift.
Today's academics argue against a 'crude determinism' towards a more sophisticated approach to disability. For them, disability isn't just a medical condition. Neither should it be reduced to being the result of social oppression, 'overlaid with negative cultural meanings'. The disability literature has been plagued with overgeneralisations and it is now time to admit that it cannot speak for over six million people who have impairments in Britain alone, and over half of a billion over the planet. On the other hand, researchers in the field have accepted the notion that all humans are impaired in a single way or another. Disability may be the normal condition of most humanity; it is not limited to a little minority of people.
The refusal to acknowledge that disablement or impairment is not only limited by those very obviously disabled but is really a 'normal condition of all humanity' is clearly the reason behind the historical oppression and exclusion of ostensibly impaired people by nearly all so-called normal people. That is said to be because of need for denial of these own vulnerability, frailty and mortality, projecting them on to others less in a position to defend themselves. The far-reaching insight that people are impaired should alert us to the fact that simplistic models may serve their purpose, but in a time-limited and contingent manner.
The above is a wide ranging exploration of academic discourse comparing and contrasting the concepts of the medical model and the social style of disability. Exploration of the advantages and disadvantages of either model as located in historical context gave rise to the idea of disability as a universal human condition that neither model could explain comprehensively. Researchers and commentators today need to acknowledge that nobody model could comprehensively encompass this type of continually shifting paradigm.