Ryan researches into disabled people who live in inaccessible housing, who cannot afford visits to the hospital, who cannot leave violent partners for financial reasons and who rely on young children to look after them.
The fictional short film Hen Night, released by BBC iPlayer on 2 September 2021, was inspired by the book and created by Ryan and Vici Wreford-Sinnott.
[4] For research on disabled people who were killed by removal of their benefits, Ryan collected names and photographs from local papers, as they were not reported on more widely.
In the introduction, Ryan comments on its disproportionate effect on disabled people, and the tabloid media's focus on "benefits scroungers" that demonised them.
In "Work", Ryan describes two similar cases of diabetic people who died from the removal of Jobseeker's Allowance after they missed in-person appointments.
Decreasing support for the Motability scheme and wheelchair provision denied disabled people from the autonomy to leave their house for medical appointments, shopping or social events.
As fewer adults own their own home, and council houses sold under Right to Buy have not been replaced, more disabled people enter the rental market, where landlords may decline prospective tenants on benefits or refuse accessibility adaptations.
Fuchsia is one of 300,000 British people living in temporary accommodation; placed in a hotel by a council, her bedding is medically insufficient and there is no kitchen or wheelchair accessibility.
According to the Home Affairs Select Committee in 2018, the Universal Credit system made it more difficult for victims of abuse to leave their partners.
An afterword in the second edition comments that the 2019 United Kingdom general election saw the success of a Conservative party signalling further defunding of the welfare state, while the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately killed disabled people and led many to remain housebound ("shield") for months.
[8] In The Observer, Yvonne Roberts reviewed Crippled as "an admirably comprehensive charge sheet of the scale of state abuse", praising Ryan's argument that the demonisation of disabled people was designed to distract from the human rights violations they faced.
[9] Alex Clark of Financial Times compared it favourably to Darren McGarvey's Poverty Safari, finding it "sobering, but fundamentally necessary" information.
Clark was most surprised by how the impact of austerity on disabled people "is so frequently hidden" from those unaffected by it and praised Ryan for her "wide-ranging research".
Krause praised Ryan's "passionate defence of every person's right to live a dignified life" and "rejection of the idea that disabled people should be protected because they are somehow inherently vulnerable".
[12] Journal of Social Policy's Rebecca Porter similarly praised that Ryan's mixture of case studies and statistics "put a human face on the crisis".
Porter criticised, however, that the book gives little attention to welfare restrictions like the Work Capability Assessment under Gordon Brown's Labour government.
[13] Mike Ervin of The Progressive chose the book as his favourite of 2019, finding that its presentation of British conservatism parallels American conservative policy on disability.
Joanna Whitehead praised its "rigorous reporting", its "shattering case studies" and its "history of the hard-won rights secured by disabled people".
A fictional disabled trainee teacher in her 20s, Jessica, recounts her hasty hen night, scheduled to just precede the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK.
Lovell praised the "cool and steely naturalism" of Chegwin and the film's attention to detail—such as the implication of no steam rising from a "hot" drink Jessica pours.