11:03pm October 10, 2010

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Miller and Gwynne’s A Life Apart, a study of 22 residential establishments for physically disabled people in Britain, is an example of the way prejudice and fear inform research. Published in 1972 but reprinted many times since then, it is a standard text for social work courses; indeed when (as a researcher myself) I sat in on interviews for staff at a residential establishment in 1990 a number of candidates regurgitated the views put forward in s A Life Apart.

Miller and Gwynne were obviously somewhat overwhelmed by their close contact with very disabled people during the course of their research, particularly the way that the emotional abuse which disabled people experience often means that we are not the sweet, compliant little souls that the rest of the world would like us to be. They displayed the classic pattern of prejudice against disabled people when they talked about the oscillations of feeling they underwent, being overwhelmed one day by pity for the “plight of the disabled” and the next day seeing “the staff as victims of the insistent, selfish demands of cripples who ill-deserved the money and care that were being so generously lavished upon them” (Miller and Gwynne, 1972, p. 7). They experienced great stress “moving among the disabled inmates and trying to see the world through their eyes” and indulged in the standard defense mechanism of doubting the experiences which were recounted to them, focusing on the individual’s psychological state. “We were subjected to many harrowing stories — of medical mismanagement, of broken promises and rejection, of social deprivation, of physical pain. The historical truth of these stories was unascertainable and sometimes suspect; the acute depression that underlay them was unmistakably true and communicated itself readily to the listener” (p. 7). The authors were so distressed by the imposition of these realities on them that they underwent psychoanalysis during the course of the research (poor things).

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