The impairment conundrum

Shortly after I became Editor of this magazine, a fellow journalist suggested that, in referring to how we, as disabled people with a variety of impairments work together, I might have indulged in what they referred to as “impairment-based, medical model journalism”. My somewhat testy response to that was, well, if we can’t talk about our impairments, who can.

That’s a position which I continue to entirely stand by. However, it does not imply open season on the discussion of impairments and conditions by anyone. We must be constantly alive to the readiness by non-disabled people to ask us about intimate areas of our being with which they have no business. Many of them remain as far away from the concept or the reality of the social model of disability – that it’s barriers not impairments which disable us – as it’s possible to be.

This is an issue which has been brought into sharp focus recently, not least because this month’s issue carries two pieces about different parts of the relationship of disabled people to health service delivery. In both cases, the discussion is clearly contextualised in the warp and weft of the social model.

Elsewhere I was asked to join a group set up to monitor production of a TV series involving disabled people. At the first meeting, prospective contributors were talked about in deeply medicalised terms.

Personal matters aside, the chief danger is that people fix on our impairment rather than either on us as people, or the external factors which truly disable us.

So while we, as a community, definitely feel that impairments are as much part of us as colour of skin is to others, we must always beware of gratifying the morbid, the ghoulish or the inappropriate.