By Melinda Smith — 2022
Adapting to life with a disability is never easy, but there are ways to help yourself cope with limitations, overcome challenges, and build a rewarding life.
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We’ve been taught to refer to people with disabilities using person-first language, but that might be doing more harm than good.
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When the problems facing the disabled community are so material, it may seem inconsequential to have a conversation about words, but a debate about how we talk about disabilities, and how disabled people talk about themselves, has been going on for decades, and it’s especially important now, with...
The reality of being a disabled person on Medicaid is far more complex and nuanced. Many people do not even know the difference between Medicaid and Medicare and simply consider them “entitlement programs,” as if tax breaks and corporate subsidies aren’t entitlements by another name.
Society prefers I talk about how I overcame my obstacles rather than the injustices I face within a world that is not built around the needs of the disabled community.
A grassroots civil-dialogue movement creates a new kind of safe space: one that invites students from across the political spectrum to discuss controversial issues, including policing, gender identity, and free speech itself.
Being an outsider can cause culture shock. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
Conceptions of identities are complex. We have a number of identities that manifest themselves in different environments or as composite forms of background experience. So, do neurodiverse conditions like autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and bipolar really comprise a part of a person’s identity?
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Like most veterans, I found the transition from military to civilian life a struggle—a tougher struggle than I had anticipated. For me, I found that one of my trickier struggles was with my identity.
The Black community is more inclined to say that mental illness is associated with shame and embarrassment. Individuals and families in the Black community are also more likely to hide the illness.
One of Erikson’s most important contributions was to describe this as a psychosocial phenomenon—an interaction between someone’s sense of who he or she is as a person and society’s recognition of that person as an individual.