Thanks and a hat tip to T. Squires.....
Experiencing stigma, the severity of a disability and a person's age and income level help determine whether someone with an impairment considers themselves to be a person with a disability, and experiencing stigma predicts whether those individuals will ultimately develop disability pride, new research from Oregon State University shows.
"Roughly 15 percent of the world's population has some kind of disability but just a fraction of those people actually identify themselves as people with disabilities. Disability identity is a critical step in accepting a disability and helps to reduce the stigma surrounding the label," said Kathleen Bogart, an assistant professor of psychology in the College of Liberal Arts at Oregon State University.
Those who self-identify are also more likely to develop pride in their disability, a shift in thinking that can help build resilience and change public attitudes about the "disabled" label, said Bogart, an expert on ableism, or prejudice about disabilities, whose research focuses on the psychosocial implications of disabilities.
"The challenge with disability as a label is that it's so mired in stigma that people don't want that label," she said. "Can we reduce the stigma and reframe the label as a neutral label that is just useful as a category, like male or female? Or taking it even further, can we shift the label to the point where people have pride in that label?"
Bogart explored issues around disability self-identification and disability pride in two new studies published recently in the journal Rehabilitation Psychology.