Disability, independance and labels...

Im sure I’m not alone in remembering the time that it dawned on me, I am disabled. Whether that is as a child going to school or in my case it was when I was first entitled to Disability living allowance. That name, my new label. Disability.

Let me be clear, when I was first deemed disabled there was no party. It isn’t like getting a job or graduating where people are actually happy about it. It isn’t a status symbol. In a lot of cases it is about the accepting of a new way of life, one of pain, shame and illness. It is, at first a pretty negative experience.

I haven’t seen long queues at the doctors wanting to be labeled as disabled, because of some perverse desire to be considered somehow as ill.  It isn’t (contrary to some newspapers) an easy life. It is a difficult life and one that involves a complete shift in perspective if you have become disabled after birth.

Now I admit there are financial “benefits” to this label. However,  these financial benefits are far outweighed by the additional costs involved with disability. Whatever sort of disability it may be. There are other, more personal costs as well. I may have a free bus pass, but it comes with the knowledge that I will never be able to drive.

I don’t know how many other disabled people have come this far in their journey or even to the same point as I have. But I have moved along way from that initial realisation of disabled.

For me, my disability was my own, completely circling around me and my lifestyle and my choices in life. I can’t say I blamed myself, but I did feel blamed and I guess in someway accepted that. I had been discriminated against because I wasn’t well enough to go to uni, yes, it might have been wrong, but the onus was always on me to change.

Until I started studying disability studies and slowly I came round to social model thinking, that actually society could go a long way to adapting to my disability and it was them that was making it harder for me.

And then I started to fight back.

I remember a particular conversation with my GP. She said to me that she didn’t consider me disabled, and that she knew of others worse off than me. At this point I was pretty clear on the social model and so I explained to her that in fact it was opinions like that which made society disabling. Apart from not knowing me personally she was trying to judge me differently to what I perceived to be true. After coming away from that appointment I considered, I am on DISABLED students allowance, DISABILITY living allowance,  I have a DISABILITY bus pass. If those things didn’t make me disabled I don’t know what does.

The worrying thing for me is that the welfare reform bill, and even ESA is actually going to make it easier for people to consider claiming falsly for these benefits. By taking away the label DISABILITY or INCAPACITY from the new benefits it also takes away the feelings associated with acceptance of  that particular label.

When I got my DLA it was a weird experience, as I was happy that I received it, but it was making a reality that I was really disabled. By changing this to personal independence payment it  refocuses it away from disability and blurs the lines quite considerably.

I am not saying this to be negative, just to be critical.  When a person receives Disability Living allowance there is a certain stigma attached and I hope, and I guess this might be behind the low fraud rate. As I said before, no one is queuing up to be labeled as disabled, and this Disability living allowance does exactly that. Personal independence payment simply takes the disability out of the benefit and replaces it with independence. The scary thing is that the opposite of independence is dependence, and there will be 500,000 sick and disabled people not entitled to be independent, and therefore, by default will be dependant.