In the recent debates on income inequality, the phrase "the deserving poor" has come up a lot. Conservative people tend to believe that only certain poor people deserve help- the ones who aren't "welfare queens with sixteen children and an iPhone"- while liberals tend to believe anyone who's poor deserves help.
I've noticed a similar dichotomy going on when it comes to disability. Sadly, this dichotomy isn't as simple as the liberal/conservative paradigm. Follow me below the orange loophole to find out why.
In my recent, abortive attempt to get on disability, I took a look at Utah's disability eligibility guidelines. I think they serve as an enlightening example of this dichotomy. Here's the link.
There's two things that are immediately, obviously wrong about this list.
* Mental illness is not enough to qualify as a disability. If your life is being impeded by major depression, schizophrenia, or PTSD, to name just a few mental illnesses that can be disabling or life-threatening, you're flat out of luck.
* The autism program is a "pilot" and only for children between the ages of two and six. On top of that, they're not accepting new applications, even though, according to a 2012 study, Utah has the highest rate of autism in the nation.
Utah's one of the reddest states in the country. Most other states, and federal SSDI, have more lenient eligibility requirements. But this is a codified example of the dichotomy I mentioned, and it's one that exists in most people's heads. I think this shows that, from society's point of view, there are two kinds of disabled people.*
"Deserving" disabled people are the people society believes are disabled enough to need extra help. Usually, they're people who someone can immediately tell are disabled, just by looking at them. The guy in the wheelchair, for example, or the kid who's obviously autistic, are a little hard to ignore. To fit in this category, you also have to be nice, sweet, always struggling to "overcome" your disability, not asking for accommodations that would inconvenience abled people, and be willing to be treated like an infant by them.
If you're not, you fall into the second category, which can best be summed up as "everyone else". If you're too loud, too bitter, too defeated, too proud, or need too much help, people think you don't deserve help, dignity, or even basic rights. And if you have a disability that is invisible, many people believe that you don't need help, because they can't see why you'd need it.
That restaurant that's been in the news lately for discriminating against a customer in a wheelchair is an extreme example of this. But it happens in other places, on both a micro and a macro level. Look at the Judge Rotenberg Center, for example, where autistic kids are given electric shocks for behaving in ways that are perfectly ordinary for them, or at the "sheltered workshops" where disabled workers receive pennies for their work.
What's most frightening about this, though, is that this sort of discrimination is so wide-spread. Unlike poor people, disabled people don't have a political party in our corner. Very few people who aren't disabled are even aware of some of these issues. So the dichotomy continues to exist in most people's heads. Though conservatives hammer it in in their rhetoric, liberals aren't immune, either. Even in the disability community, you see it: people discriminating against other people on the basis of labels or diagnoses. "You're not really disabled, because you don't have a diagnosis." "You're not really disabled, because [insert condition here] isn't a real disease."
This needs to stop.
When you're talking to a disabled person, can you notice how you're treating them? Can you try not to judge them for not acting the way you think they should act? I know it's difficult to remove ideas from your head and replace them with new ones, but getting rid of this dichotomy is the only way to treat disabled people with the respect and dignity we all deserve.
*I'm generalizing here, I know, and I'm not saying that everyone who has a disability should be eligible for disability assistance. That would be ridiculous. I'm just using the eligibility requirements as a jumping-off point for discussion.