Disability

[12] In fact, the Ancient Greeks may not have viewed persons with disability all that differently from more able-bodied individuals as terms describing them in their records appear to be very vague.

[14] In the early modern period there was a shift to seeking biological causes for physical and mental differences, as well as heightened interest in demarcating categories: for example, Ambroise Pare, in the sixteenth century, wrote of "monsters", "prodigies", and "the maimed".

[16] The concept of the "norm" developed in this time period, and is signaled in the work of the Belgian statistician, sociologist, mathematician, and astronomer Adolphe Quetelet, who wrote in the 1830s of l'homme moyen – the average man.

Quetelet postulated that one could take the sum of all people's attributes in a given population (such as their height or weight) and find their average and that this figure should serve as a statistical norm toward which all should aspire.

With disability viewed as part of a person's biological make-up and thus their genetic inheritance, scientists turned their attention to notions of weeding such as "deviations" out of the gene pool.

[22] The Industrial Revolution and the advent of capitalism made it so that people were no longer tied to the land and were then forced to find work that would pay a wage in order to survive.

The wage system, in combination with industrialized production, transformed the way bodies were viewed as people were increasingly valued for their ability to produce like machines.

[23] Capitalism and the industrial revolution effectively solidified this class of "disabled" people who could not conform to the standard worker's body or level of work power.

Impairment in bodily structure or function is defined as involving an anomaly, defect, loss or other significant deviation from certain generally accepted population standards, which may fluctuate over time.

Around the early 1970s, sociologists, notably Eliot Friedson, began to argue that labeling theory and social deviance could be applied to disability studies.

[63] This is especially true in the UK, where it is argued under the social model that while someone's impairment (for example, having a spinal cord injury) is an individual property, "disability" is something created by external societal factors such as a lack of accessibility.

The specific goals and demands of the movement are accessibility and safety in transportation, architecture, and the physical environment; equal opportunities in independent living, employment, education, and housing; and freedom from abuse, neglect, and violations of patients' rights.

This framework, dubbed the "second wave" of disability rights, seeks to examine the many systems of oppression that are intertwined with ableism, such colonialism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchal capitalism.

UN officials, including the High Commissioner for Human Rights, have characterized the bill as representing a paradigm shift in attitudes toward a more rights-based view of disability in line with the social model.

In developing nations, where the vast bulk of the estimated 650 million disabled people reside, a great deal of work is needed to address concerns ranging from accessibility and education to self-empowerment, self-supporting employment, and beyond.

[100] A study by researchers in Denmark suggests that information on self-reported days of absence due to sickness can be used to effectively identify future potential groups for disability pension.

In Switzerland, social policies in the field of disability have been significantly reshaped over the last two decades by reducing the number of allowances awarded and by increasing the recourse to vocational rehabilitation measures.

Marta Russell notes that "[a] primary basis for oppression of disabled persons (those who could work with accommodations) is their exclusion from exploitation as wage laborers.

In addition, adult day care programs arranged community activities by scheduling field trips to public places (e.g. zoos, and movie theaters).

[104] Community-integrated employment opportunities are offered to ID people at minimum or higher wages, in a variety of occupations ranging from customer service, clerical, janitorial, hospitality and manufacturing positions.

According to the same study conducted by JARID, many who had participated found that they had made smaller incomes when compared to their co-workers, had an excess of time throughout their days, because they did not have work.

One of the ways in which the psycho-emotional health of persons with disabilities is adversely affected is through the internalization of the oppression they experience, which can lead to feeling that they are weak, crazy, worthless or any number of other negative attributes that may be associated with their conditions.

According to writer Simi Linton, the act of passing takes a deep emotional toll by causing disabled individuals to experience loss of community, anxiety and self-doubt.

As a result, Schlak provides three categories of supercrip narratives used:[127] Characters in fiction that bear physical or mental markers of difference from perceived societal norms are frequently positioned as villains within a text.

Jay Dolmage offers Kevin Spacey's character, Verbal Kint, in the film Usual Suspects as an example of this, and depictions like this can reflect able-bodied society's mistrust of disabled people.

[130] The Hunchback of Notre Dame's Quasimodo, The Elephant Man's John Merrick, A Christmas Carol's Tiny Tim, and even news broadcasts that refer to people as "victims" or "sufferers" are a few examples of this stereotype.

Incidence of disability is reported to be greater among several minority communities across the globe, according to a systematic analysis of the Global Burden of Disease Study.

[147][148][149][150][151] With respect to disability in the United States, Camille A. Nelson, writing for the Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law, notes the dual discrimination that racial minorities with disabilities experience from the criminal justice system, expressing that for "people who are negatively racialized, that is people who are perceived as being non-white, and for whom mental illness is either known or assumed, interaction with police is precarious and potentially dangerous.

Women with disabilities face a sort of "double stigmatization" in which their membership to both of these marginalized categories simultaneously exacerbates the negative stereotypes associated with each as they are ascribed to them.

In 1948, Sir Ludwig Guttman, a neurologist working with World War II veterans with spinal injuries at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Aylesbury in the UK, began using sport as part of the rehabilitation programs of his patients.