Attributions of CAUSE of Disability & Personal Responsibility.
    Fundamental Attribution Error:
        Over attribution of personal cause.
        Under attribution of situational cause. 

• Using the image: where do we attribute the cause of disability, the source of the "issues" of disability?
• Consider the following: Blindness, Mental Retardation, Cerebral Palsy, Alzheimer's.
• Consider the following: ADHD, Alcoholism, Tourette's, Learning Disabilities.
• With mental, cognitive, and psychiatric disabilities, we may over attribute the nature of the problem to factors over which the person "should" be able to take control. The person with ADHD "should" just settle down and focus. The alcoholic "should" just leave the booze alone.
• Assumptions and Attributions flow from such things as:
• Personal Experience
• Traditional Views
• Social Norms
• Problems with this stem from:
• General knowledge lags behind research
• Some people operate under different "sets of rules." For example, alcohol acts differently in the biology of an alcoholic than in a non-alcoholic. Much the same as food allergies react differently in different people.

• Description: Activity; Appearance; Experience.
• What people do and do not do and how they do what they do - What it looks like, "presenting conditions"
• Typical/Atypical: Related to norms and standards. (example: walking with two legged gait with heel strike first vs. using a cane to walk).
  
• Observable & Reportable: Observable can be sensed by any external observer and objectified, vs. Pain, which is reported as experience.
  
• Explanation: Activity; Appearance; Experience.
• Constructs seeking to provide understanding for "Why are they like this?"
• Medical-Diagnostic Explanation: there is something wrong, lacking, missing, faulty about people with disability. (examples: arthritis, macular degeneration, spinal cord injury)
  
• Constructed Explanation: the environment is constructed with barriers. Stairs may require activity which causes pain or prevents access.
• Personal Explanation: something within the person, such as sin, personal flaw, poor judgment, etc.
  
• Legitimacy: Judgment & Response (this is the most important definitional element of the theory)
• Judgment refers to value assessments of groups about whether they have valid and acceptable explanations for the ways they are, according to a generally unspoken set of standards or values.
• Response are the actions that are deemed appropriate by those rendering the value judgment.
  
• Legitimacy is today often ascribed along with a belief in personal control or responsibility:
• DISCUSSION: 3 Liver transplant candidates - who should get the available liver? What if there were 2, or 3 livers available?
  
1. professional athlete who had years of drinking,
2. liver damaged as a result of overuse of Ibuprofen used to combat pain,
   
3. liver was damaged by a car accident,
   
• What are the social biases?
  
• How do these reflect archaic, yet perpetually influencial, ways of thinking about people and about disability?
  

Gilson & DePoy (2004) on Language:
    They speak of Atypicality rather than Disability.
    What disables a person may be constructed by culture rather than naturally and necessarily part of the individual (stairs & round door knobs).
             (DePoy, E. & Gilson, S.F. (2004). Rethinking disability: Principles for professional and social change. Belmont, CA: Thompson.)

"Real" Disability & Fakers, Wannabees, and Coat-tail Riders.

From Make Them Go Away:

• Slip on winter ice, resulting head injury.
  
• Riding with driver who has had 3 drinks - crash results in permanent mobility disability.
  
• Blind as a result of not properly monitoring diabetes.
  
• Mother's poor pre-natal care leads to intellectual disability.
  
• Mother's alcoholism leads to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.
  
• Nerve damage as a result of elective cosmetic surgery. 
  
• Hearing loss from listening to loud music for years.
  

• Demonological: Possession by evil spirits.  
  
• Demons have entered the body of the afflicted.
• Possession may or may not be due to the person's spiritual condition (weakness or virtue)
  
• Person may be evil and have essentially invited the demon in through devil worship.
  
• Treatment often consists of killing the person to separate the soul from the demon, or "Stomping" which involved making the body so wracked with pain that the demon would leave. 
  
• Historically, several Witch Crazes have targeted those who were atypical and resulted in purging them from the community.
  

• Menace: Disability suggests a threat to society.
•  Disability is God’s curse for parental sins, sins of the “afflicted” person.
•  Disabled people are unpredictable, retarded or crazy, or both.
•  Through promiscuity, they will spread their “defective” genes.
•  They don’t understand or conform to societal norms.
•  How can we have a “polite” or “civilized” society with those who might misbehave?
•  Our children need to be protected from those who would give in to their sexual impulses.
• Object of Dread:   Lepers, Monsters, Hateful creatures rejected by God.
• Drawing upon the "Just World Hypothesis" as a way of reckoning the randomness of disability, this approach creates a sense of justice in that it is "the person's own fault." Therefore God is still fair & loving & good, the world is safe and predictable, and we can persist in our delusions of acceptability.
  

• Subhuman: Animal or Vegetable:
• Not capable of living up to the expectations of humanity.
• Lost their essential human qualities.
• “Retards” or less than human.
  
• Overlooked by God.
  
  
• Object of Ridicule: FREAK:
•  Village Idiot
•  Fool
•  Circus side show / freak show
  
  
• Object of Pity or Charity:
• Middle Ages: Catholic Church was in power. Depending on the particular town, there might be Charity or Persecution.
  
• With the poverty, poor nutrition, disease, & poor sanitation, it was pretty common to see disability.
• With the death rate of children, it was uncommon to have people with congenital anomalies live very long.
  
• Elephant Man - taken in by the Charitable to “rescue” him from the cruelty of the Freak-show Circus tent.
• Jerry’s Kids.
• Never to be accepted as equals, but as opportunities for "us" to be virtuous by helping "those less fortunate."
• In Middle Ages, people needed objects of charity so they could absolve their sins by being charitable. No "less fortunate," then no opportunity to buy off our salvation.
  
  
• Holy Innocent: Child of God, or Eternal Child of God.
• Blessed, special, God’s Favorites or God’s special blessing to the family.
• Eternal Child (& incompetent):
• “25, but with the mind of a 6 year old.”
• Asexual - sex is for adult, "special" people are perpetually childlike, therefore asexual.
  
• Cute.
• Jerry’s “Kids”
• Expectations to remain dependent.
  
  
• Unproductive:  
  
• Capitalism brings the need for the populace to be "productive members of society."
  
• Productivity increasingly comes to mean working for others in factories & offices. 
  
• Assembly Lines and Efficiency Experts increasingly define the statistically normal, average, typical, as the ideal.
• Poorhouses of Victorian and Early 20th Century eras are for the unproductive, who are ostracized for their unproductivity whether due to disability, illness, old age, etc. Poorhouses are made to be horrible places on purpose, as they house those who are less moral and therefore responsible for their position in life. Horrible conditions also encourage families to continue to care for dependent members, in order to keep them off the public dole.
• Scrooge quote, "Then let them get on with it (dying) and decrease the surplus population!"
• Today, the "Unproductive" are either legitimized by living off wealth, or more commonly, illegitimized through living off "Government Entitlement Programs" and "Welfare."
  
• Atypicality & Economics - Crazy or Eccentric?
  
• Across all of history, those with the ability to pay, those who were in upper socioeconomic echelons were treated differently
• "The Madness of King George III"  atypical, hallucinatory, demented behavior. Treated & returned to the throne.
• Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Charles Mingus (jazz bassist), Brian Wilson (Beach Boys), Michael Jackson - the often bizarre atypicality is expected, almost demanded by the public and the fans. (Kottler, J., (2006) Divine Madness: Ten Stories of Creative Struggle. Jossey/Bass)
  
  
  
• Sick:
  
• Fragile, frail, needing medical attention.    
  
• Dilemma of being “treated” but never “cured” - Medicine’s Failures.
• Emphasis on "Cure" - make "them" more like "us".
  
• Nuveen Investments ad from Superbowl 2000: 
  

Nuveen - Christopher Reeve (2000) - 0:60 (USA)

• Citizen & Developing Individual:
•  Human
•  Equal
•  Human Rights apply here too.
•  Deserving of what You or I want out of life.
•  Inclusion
•  Participation
  
•  Contributor & Consumer
  
•  Responsible for one’s actions.

Representation in Film and Literature 

   How are disabilities presented?
    Are disabilities used as a sort of shorthand to character types?
    Archetypes - what do we know or can we assume about a character based on representation of disability?
                                                                         1     2 

Quote, "To be disabled meant to fight someone else's reality. Other people's attitudes, not one's own disability, were the biggest barrier."

DISCUSSION: What is "people first" language?