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Essay on ADA Disabilities Act
The usual and common-sense definition of disability is based on a medical model that sees disability as a limitation or lack of competence on the part of the individual. This definition fails to acknowledge that in some cultures disability as a concept does not exist.A medical model of disability regards disability as a defect or sickness which must be cured through medical intervention. The individual with a disability is in the sick role under the medical model. When people are sick, they are excused from the normal obligations of society: going to school, getting a job, taking on family responsibilities, etc. They are also expected to come under the authority of the medical profession in order to get better. Thus, until recently, most disability policy issues have been regarded as health issues, and physicians have been regarded as the primary authorities in this policy area.
One can see the influence of the medical model in disability public policy today, most notably in the Social Security system, in which disability is defined as the inability to work. This is consistent with the role of the person with a disability as sick.Davis (1997) provocatively suggests that disability embodies, supplants, and transcends these postmodernist classifiers. According to Davis, it is in part disability’s instability as a category that will allow Disability Studies the chance to "provide a critique of and a politics to discuss how all groups, based on physical traits or markings, are selected for disablement by a larger system of regulation and signification. So it is paradoxically the most marginalized group--people with disabilities—who can provide the broadest way of understanding contemporary systems of oppression
According to Davis (1997) it is clear that the perceptions of disability embedded in the medical model discourse play a major part in structuring the perceptions that people hold and the ways in which they interact in relation.....
