Disability - Lecture Notes 24/1/2020

Abi Perason a.v.pearson@keele.ac.uk

Models of Disability:

Medical
Social
Interactionist - this happy middle ground between the medical and social model

Disaility Theorists to read about:

Carol Thomas Shakespeare Watson Shellie Tremain - Foucault and the government of disability. Tany Tchaicovsky - the government of disability

History of the medical model of disability, coming out of the first world war, fixing these "broken men". It came from an altruistic approach to these people who had "made sacrifices" for their community. This is when hospitals started to come in with these certain treatments, the emergence of the word prosthesis.

Biopower, this idea of medicine being a system of power. It's about control and regulations of bodies. It's about getting the person with disability to fit the system

An example of this would be devalued and quantified in PIP forms.

Law

The equality act, comes from a medical model, focusing on the negatives of what someone cannot do.

Also has the public sector equalities duty - we need to give 'due regard' to people with disabilities and put systems to prevent them being a barrier - but what does due regard mean?

Mental Deficiency Acts

from 1913 to 1927

the punitive removal of rights from persons with disabilities

strata of "idiocy" , "imbeciles", "high grade + low grade"

these labels came initially from medical literature - before going into legal literature

Mental Health Act 1983

brought in "disability alone could not be the sole factor in the decision of whether or not a person is to be admitted"

1981 (2 years before) was the UN year of disability, started to consider disability as a human rights issue

Mike Oliver started to bring this social model of disability in relation to industrial revolution

The Decade of Disability in 1992 - none of the documents were binding

1975 - Rights of the "Mentally Retarded" - read this for Essay []

Mental Capacity Act 2005

This is where we start getting the idea of viewing person in their entirety

Soft Law

Thinks like the UN declarations. Non enforceable but are supposed to guide how we act.

1980 - International Classification on Impairments, Disabilities, and Handicaps

UPIAS - union of physically impaired persons against segregation

Paul Hunt had polio as a child and lived in various institutions, moved out into Leonard Cheshire homes as an adult. These started off as homes, but became more institutionised. In response to this UPIAS was made. Started by writing a letter to the guardian about it.

Dr Mike Oliver coined the term social

The Interactionist Model

UNCRPD - UN Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities was passed in 2006

It's a specific restatement on the European Convention on Human Rights, but with the same application to disability.