2:28pm September 10, 2014

➸ The Perorations of Lady Bracknell: Chestnuts roasting on an open fire

This is a rare type of post by me, but someone’s asking questions that I think this post can answer at least in part. I’ve got a really long post brewing in Scrivener, but until then, this post should give some ideas about what the social model of disability is and is not. The reason this is rare is because I don’t think in models, so I don’t generally go out of my way to explain them to people. But for people who do think in models, these explanations can be useful, so I’m making an effort here.

I am not, by nature, a person who goes by models of the world in order to explain things. But I’m in the process of answering an ask that deals with the differences between the medical and social models of disability. And my answer is getting extremely long. So long that it’s requiring an entire project file in Scrivener.

Anyway, even if I don’t subscribe to the medical model or the social model or the radical model of disability, I can still more or less understand them. And most people don’t.

Most people think that the medical model of disability means “disabled people should get medical treatment.”

Most people think that the social model of disability means “all of disabled people’s problems are caused by society.”

Neither of those things are accurate, and if you click on the above link, you can see an eloquent post describing precisely why those are inaccurate ways of looking at the medical and social models.

A couple of quotes:

To say that the social model view of very poor hearing is that it wouldn’t represent a problem were it not for the fact that society doesn’t adapt to the needs of people with very poor hearing is, I’m afraid, a misunderstanding of the social model. The social model distinguishes between impairment (the very poor hearing) and disability (society’s failure to adapt to the needs of those with very poor hearing), certainly. What it doesn’t do is to say that having very poor hearing isn’t inherently a problem.

[…]

The social model of disability recognizes both the existence of impairments and the depth and breadth and extent of their impact on the individual. But it doesn’t dwell on that aspect of being a disabled person because that’s not what it was designed to illustrate. Instead, it differentiates between impairment (a lack of, or difference in, function – the stuff that can’t be changed) and the oppressive and exclusive nature of disability (society’s failure to treat people who have impairments as equals – the stuff that can be changed.)

And then, with the medical model:

I know I’ve said this before, but the medical model has been perilously-badly named. As it stands, it sounds as though it’s about providing medical care to people with impairments. Nuh-uh. It is nothing of the kind. If we could rename it the “Dear God, you can’t expect me to live next door to that!” model, then people like Jack would be far less likely to conclude that the two models can happily exist together in tandem.

Under the medical model of disability, you “have a disability” if there is something fairly seriously medically “wrong with” you. Having something “wrong with” you diminishes your position in society. It reduces your rights. Under the medical model, there is no obligation on society to adapt the general environment so that it’s accessible to you. Such obligation as there is lies with the medical profession – hence, “medical model”. Their job is to normalise you; to change and improve you until you fit in. Can’t be done in your particular situation? Oh, shame. Well, in that case, you get to be hidden away, either in your own home or in an institution, so that normal people – the ones with rights – aren’t exposed to your hideous deformities and distressing tics.

So basically, the medical model is one version of an individual model of disability. Under the medical model, everything that goes wrong related to disability, including discrimination and oppression, is a result of you having a medically defective body. Your body is seen as the source of all of those problems, regardless of the actual source. And then, the solution is to fix you, by giving you as much medical treatment as will make you function as closely to a nondisabled person as possible.

So when someone says “I believe in the medical model because I think disabled people should be able to get medical treatment,” they don’t know what they’re talking about. That isn’t the medical model. There’s nothing in the social model that says disabled people can’t or shouldn’t get medical treatment.

Meanwhile, people misunderstand the social model as well. They think it means, “Everything that goes wrong with being disabled stems from society.” And certainly there are people who use it that way, just as there are people who misuse the idea of the medical model. But what the social model actually does, is try to differentiate between the ways in which your body differs from your society’s norm (known as impairments under this model), and the ways in which society discriminates and oppresses you (known as disability under this model), and focuses on getting rid of disability more than it focuses on getting rid of impairment. Despite its focus, there’s nothing about the social model that says people shouldn’t get medical treatment.

There’s also something called the radical model of disability. I’ll let the people who came up with that term speak for themselves:

http://still.my.revolution.tao.ca/radical

This approach to disability looks at disability entirely as a social construct and does not separate impairment from disability like the social model.

Radical disability activists acknowledge that we do not control the definition of disability - that it is defined by those with power to their benefit.

Women, queer people, trans people, racialized people, poor people and other marginalized people were all considered disabled at one point in history, largely under the umbrella of feeble-minded and/or degenerate.

Radical disability activists are very critical of certain groups’ attempts to get more privilege by defining themselves as other than disabled. Members of the Deaf and psychiatrized communities have attempted to distance themselves from other disabled people by saying essentially “there is nothing wrong with us. We are a linguistic minority or we think and experience the world differently but we are not disabled. There is nothing wrong with us.”

The radical disability model says there is nothing wrong with any of us.

We argue that disability is simply defined as those who are externally identified as disabled and those who self-identify as disabled.

To us, disability is not a point of individual or social tragedy but a natural and necessary part of human diversity. The tragedy of disability is not our minds and bodies but oppression, exclusion and marginalization.

We do not need to be cured. We do not need charity. We need respect, equality and access.

So that’s the radical model.

Don’t ask me which model I go by. Because I don’t do models. I can’t do models. Even though I can understand these models well enough to explain them, I certainly can’t hold them in my head as substitutes for reality. I think they’re very useful for people who are able to hold such things in their head, and that the social and radical models can give people perspectives that they never had before. But on a personal level I just can’t do it.

So I’d encourage you to go through and read the entire post that is linked to at the top of this post.

And then read these sets of posts:

Medicalization and the Medical Model

That’s all if you can do all that reading, of course. I’ve tried to summarize the most important points in this post, but reading all that will give you more depth to the various ways people have looked at disability.

A friend of mine has also made an important point many times, which is that the opposite of the social model is not the medical model, but rather the individual model. The medical model is only one form of the individual model. Other models including the personal tragedy model, the moral model, etc. are also individual models of disability, just as the medical model is.

tl;dr: The medical model of disability isn’t about getting medical treatment for disability. It’s about seeing all problems related to disability as stemming from a medical problem with an individual’s body, even when the problems stem from discrimination or oppression. The social model of disability isn’t about failing to get medical treatment for disability, it’s about separating out the differences in our bodies (impairments) from the way we get treated in society (disability). And I don’t subscribe to either model, but I thought this was important information for those who do. And I’m going to have a super-long post coming up about how all this applies to autism, because someone asked what seemed like a simple question, that got more and more complicated to answer the longer I stared at it. Also, there are other models of disability that I have linked to above for those who are interested.