I think the difficulty that has come with that is that today we understand disability as almost exclusively a medical situation, and thus stress cure… - Kim E. Nielsen

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I think the difficulty that has come with that is that today we understand disability as almost exclusively a medical situation, and thus stress cure, and when cure doesn’t happen, folks are considered failures, and folks with disabilities tend to be only understood in this very medical framework, and that, you know, the reality that folks with disabilities have lives far outside of, you know, their medical diagnoses is often ignored. The medical diagnoses are often considered to be permanent, and that diagnosis has come to have great power, particularly with stigmatized diagnoses, of devaluing people economically, socially, and people...have become simply less integrated into the communities after diagnosis...under the medical model, there’s nothing to be learned or gained from disability, and I would argue instead that human variability is really quite immense and can be a great blessing, and it’s something we rely on as a society, but when we categorize people with disabilities, you know, as inherently deficient and in need of cure, always in need of change and never good enough, that really does folks a disservice and it damages all of us.