Friday, December 12, 2014

The Myth of Overcoming Disability

In the media, there are often "inspirational" stories about people who have "overcome" their disabilities. However, if a person's disability is permanent, this does not actually happen. These stories hold those disabled people to an impossible standard and perpetuate the belief that disability is bad and should be extinguished.

What can happen, though, is the disability working to the disabled person's advantage or compensation for the person's disability. If the disability is a different neurotype, that person can definitely work with the disability, and they may even be able to compensate for a part of their disability using another part due to how complex neurotypes are.

So, those stories in the media are misinterpretations of what actually happened, which is that someone compensated for or worked with their disability (or they could have been forced to be "normal", but that's a different story).

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