What is the social model of disability and how is it key to understanding disabled identity?

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with me. I am different, and differences are not accommodated in society, and this is the route of my struggle, not my body or my brain. Disability does not exist within me; it is a social process in which I am oppressed and systematically set up to struggle in layered, complex, sometimes obvious and sometimes subtle ways.

UPDATE: In this article, I do not explicitly outline the tensions between the social model and how it fails to encompass chronically ill, neurodivergent and mental health distress embodied experiences. While I still hold that disability is something that should be primarily understood as not existing within the individual, I also understand and hugely resonate with the ways in which this way of thinking about disability lacks nuance when it comes to the lived experience of struggling with a given impairment that may not necessarily be possible for society to entirely alleviate. I am currently working on an article that addresses these critiques, and possible alternatives to the social model. I do however think that the social model is an excellent place to start with this line of thinking.

Tone indicators and key terms for this post:

• /disgen = disingenuous, I am writing satirically from the perspective of which I am actually critiquing

• /m = metaphorically speaking

• /neg = negative connotation, said in a negative light or reflecting on something negative

• Social model (skip to definition)

• Medical model (skip to definition)

• Othered/othering = an overly binary way of thinking that leads to the cultural exclusion and rejection of people with impairments; there are those who are 'normal' and those who are 'other', so much so that disabled people seem to be 'disowned' from the rest of humanity (Watermeyer, 2013)

• Impairment/impaired= the functional limitation within the individual caused by physical, mental, or sensory differences (Mallet, 2014) in other words, simply the way the person is

• Normative= what we perceive to be and think is normal, regardless of whether it actually is, which leads to the attitudes that oppress disabled people (Weele, 2022)

• Ableism= the common belief that the normative body is the standard and is perfect, which creates the pathway for discrimination against people who do not meet these normative standards (Loja, 2013)

• Neurodivergence = this describes the 'potentially infinite neurological differences between humans' (Stenning, 2021). Along with diagnostic labels such as autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, etc, it also refers to the general, natural variation in the way people's brains work!

Society generally understands disability as a medical issue, something that an individual has, and therefore, their struggles are their responsibility because it is their ‘problem’ (Shyman, 2016). When someone enters the world with an othered body or an impairment, whatever term you prefer- they are seen as being doomed to a burdened existence, and when someone acquires a disability, through injury, aging, or genetic inheritance, it is seen as a tragedy that ruins their life or even ends it /neg.

If disability means tragedy, we must do whatever we can to fix these individuals. They must change elements of who they naturally are, their ‘wrong’ bodies, their ‘wrong’ minds, they must be corrected, in other words, made ‘normal’ to improve their quality of life (Shyman, 2016), this is the solution, right? Not working towards dismantling ableism, the stigmatization of difference, and the physical and attitudinal barriers disabled people face, no, the route of the problem- and therefore the solution- is the individual, not society /disgen.

But are any of these things true at all? All these ideas are what we, throughout the disability rights discourse, refer to as the ‘medical model’ of disability. It is named the medical model because these ideas are primarily concerned with ‘fixing’ people who are different, which is rooted in the medical obsession with the normative body (Grue, 1981) regardless of the fact that variations in human biology are natural, and difference is normal. Don’t some of these medical model ideas seem deeply…misguided, to say the least?

Not only is the medical approach flawed in logic (it is not unheard of that the world of medicine over-generalises and standardizes what is healthy, the BMI for example), but it is also incredibly harmful, as this attitude assigns absolutely zero accountability to society, and instead insists that all the ways in which disabled people struggle is a fault of their own and is solely their 'cross to bear', when in fact, disability is a social process in which individuals are disabled by society being inaccessible, not by their bodies. Therefore, it is very much a collective issue that society needs to work on, the individual isn't what needs to change.

I would argue that the word ‘disabled’ is better understood as a verb, something that is done to this demographic of people because they are different, and society was not built with these differences in mind and does not like to change or accommodate these differences. It instead upholds silly standards of ability, performance and aesthetics, forcing different people to conform, and if they cannot conform, they are left behind to struggle. People therefore do not have disabilities, they have their bodies, and they are disabled by their inaccessible environment.

Therefore, the problem, the onus of disability, is within society.

This idea and shift in perspective is known as the ‘social model of disability', the term coined by Mike Oliver in 1981(Mallet, 2014), however the idea was developed by the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) in 1976 when they published 'Fundamental Principles of Disability' (Mallet, 2014). The social model of disability focuses on advocacy for disability rights and dismantling ableism in society, in contrast to the medical model which focuses on changing the individual (Mallet, 2014).

Understanding myself through the social model lens

As a disabled person, adopting this understanding of disability feels very validating of my experience. The only reason I have ever felt the need to change who I am is because this idea was instilled into me at a young age, that I am the problem that needs to be fixed, the wrong that needs to be made right, and so I neglected myself and my needs for the comfortability of strangers and people who never truly cared about my wellbeing. Those 19 years of going against my nature now feel like a demoralizingly big backlog of trauma that is screaming to be processed, so big that I am more inclined to let it continue to grow than begin putting these things through the system. I was robbed of my system a long time ago, I don’t know how to get it back, and now I don’t know where to begin with this backlog /m.

If I were raised in a society that embraced neurodivergence, made accommodations for different neurotypes, and combated against the stigmatization of people who are different, I would not be disabled. I may have still struggled in some ways, but I would have my system, my skills to cope as opposed to being forced to suppress my natural self-regulation strategies because they look different. I would not face the numerous barriers that make my life harder than it should be. In other words, it is not my fault. There is nothing wrong with me, I do not need to be corrected, I am natural and normal, I am not broken and no pieces are missing, and dear reader, the same applies to you. It is the world that needs to be held accountable disabling those who are different. So, let's leave behind that medical model, and that damn puzzle piece symbol, because there is nothing missing here!

See my post on the infamous puzzle piece

Sources:

Grue, J. (1981)'Disability and discourse analysis' [Online]. Vermont : Ashgate. Available from: Library Catalogue: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/livhope/detail.action?docID=1869304 p. 38 [Accessed 19 November 2023].

Loja, E.; Costa, E.; Hughes, B.; Menezes, I. (2013) 'Disability, embodiment and ableism: stories of resistance' [Online]. Abingdon: Routledge. Available from: Alma/SFX Local Collection: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.705057 p. 191 [Accessed 16 December 2023].

Mallett, R.; Runswick-Cole, K. (2014) 'Approaching Disability : Critical Issues and Perspectives' London: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis Group: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/livhope/detail.action?docID=1721084 p. 4-8 [Accessed 8 November 2023].

Shyman, E. (2016) 'The Reinforcement of Ableism: Normality, the Medical Model of Disability, and Humanism in Applied Behavior Analysis and ASD' [Online]. Washington: American Association of Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities. Available from: EBSCOhost Education Research Complete: https://hope.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/44HOP_INST/117ln56/cdi_proquest_miscellaneous_1824546193 p. 368-370 [Accessed 10 December 2023].

Stenning, A.; Rosqvist, B. (2021)'Neurodiversity studies: mapping out possibilities of a new critical paradigm' [Online]. Abingdon: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis Open Access: https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2021.1919503 p.1533 [Accessed 10 December 2023].

Watermeyer, B. (2013) 'Cultural othering and material deprivation, Towards a Contextual Psychology of Disablism' [Online]. United Kingdom: Routledge. Available from: Alma/SFX Local Collection: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/livhope/reader.action?docID=988000 p.33 [Accessed 10 November 2023].

Weele, S. (2022)'Doing' normativity in disability studies: soft suggestions towards an empirical ethics of disability' [Online]. Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis Online: https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2022.2087492 p. 7 [Accessed 16 December 2023].