Acceptance

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 non-action 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.)