How disability affects a person?

When disabled individuals lack independence or feel that they cannot live fully, issues can arise. For example, disabled people may experience depression and social isolation as a result of their limitations. They may also experience financial instability as a result of their mental or physical limitations.

What are negative attitudes towards disability?

The resultant attitudes include pity, fear, uneasiness, guilt, sympathy and respect. These negative perceptions of disability relegate persons with disabilities to the background, thereby making them the largest oppressed minority in society.

Why don’t people like to see disabled people?

Few want to see those who are disabled because it reminds them of what can happen to them, and they don’t want that. No one wants to believe that they could end up with a disability, so, they objectify in order to distance themselves emotionally. Instead of being a child or a wife or a father, the person with a handicap is viewed as a ‘thing.’

Why do people treat disabled people as an ‘other’?

Because people are afraid to acknowledge that they or those close to them could become disabled. By making disabled people an ‘other’ they feel safer. They want to think they couldn’t possibly have a child with downs’ syndrome or end up in a wheelchair one day when they’re old.

Can people with a disability be attractive?

Whether a disability is visible or invisible, people with a disability can be fabulously attractive on so many levels. But you’re almost disqualified from looking good. Sometimes people will say to me: “You are so pretty but you are in a wheelchair …”

Can you see well if you are not looking stereotypically blind?

Not looking stereotypically blind, people assume I can see perfectly well. This mindset is something that will continue to keep us at the periphery of society, especially if people restrict their understanding of disability to a picture in their heads that says all disabled people look the same.