Conflict with Health Living With a Disability
“Conflict with Health Living With a Disability” at the centre of the image. In the background, a health icon is displayed.
Living with a disability means that you are always going to the health case system, more often than someone without a disability. Whether it is through the public health care system or the private health care system, seeing your medical professional that is for your disability always puts you in the position of needing more than someone without a disability. But healthcare isn’t accessible. The idea of being healthy is not just inaccessible but complicated with the comparisons of what is considered “healthy.”
The medical model of disability has been the main understanding of disability within society leading to every interaction being influenced by your diagnosis (or lack of diagnosis) with the medical professional being the point of contact of whether you get access or not. Many of the policies were based on the medical model requiring diagnosis to get support and services.
But some disabilities are easier to diagnose than others. Some disabilities have certain perceptions and biases leading to overdiagnosis and underdiagnosis. If you have multiple identities, the intersectionality of experiences can make it even harder to get access. The visibility and invisibility of the disability makes it difficult for policymakers and medical professionals to make the situation clear because it is not reality.
The concept “social determinants of health” is becoming more present in policy conversations providing a broader understanding that there are many different aspects of life and identity that impacts our health. While disability is one determinant of health, it also includes access to food, housing, employment, and social (community) connection which impacts the quality of life and our health care systems.
While we are moving towards the social model of disability. This is shown by shifting from the disability being the problem to the environments that we are currently living in are the problem that are not designed with accessibility and disability in mind. We have not fully transitioned out of the medical model ways of doing. Governments specially still require diagnosis in order to access supports, services, and funding. Specifically, diagnosis that fit their definition of who needs it more (severe disability) instead of the reality that all persons with disabilities do require different level of support due to the additional costs of living with a disability.
As long as we consider the divide of unhealthy and healthy based on the idealistic version of a person’s health, we will never meet the needs of society where disability is part of being human because living will never be perfect or healthy in that mindset.
Amanda