Disability News service blog post by John Pring,2018: Project offers new bridge between chronic illness community and disability movement
A disabled researcher has suggested a way to bring the hundreds of thousands of people with chronic illness under the umbrella of the disabled people’s movement.
Catherine Hale (pictured), who has lived with a diagnosis of ME for nearly 30 years, hopes that her new discussion paper will build bridges between the disabled people’s movement and the chronic illness community.
She is keen for her paper to “stimulate reaction and debate” from members of the movement, disability studies academics and policy-makers.
Hale suggests in the paper that people with chronic illness can be viewed as having a “stamina impairment” which restricts their activities – despite any treatment regimes they undergo – and that such people could make up the second-largest impairment group of disabled people in the UK.
She says that people with such impairments can and do experience socially-constructed disabling barriers, such as their marginalisation by society, the lack of medical understanding of their conditions, and the discrimination they face from those who doubt their ill-health.
She hopes that this will provide a way to explain their oppression through the social model of disability and bring them under the umbrella of the disabled people’s movement.
The publication of the discussion paper by The Centre for Welfare Reform is the latest stage of the three-year Chronic Illness Inclusion Project, which is receiving £40,000 lottery funding through the pioneering user-led DRILL (Disability Research into Independent Living and Learning) programme.
The project’s aim is to explore the experience of chronic illness within the social model of disability, co-produce an agenda for social, political and cultural change, and “forge a collective voice” for the online chronic illness community under the umbrella of the wider disability movement.
Hale says she believes that the only way that people with chronic illness can have their voices heard is for them to adopt a social model approach, which she believes will “strengthen and enrich” the disabled people’s movement.
She argues in the discussion paper that “there are restrictions to our lives, activities and wellbeing that are entirely created by social and political responses to chronic illness”, an approach that would allow a social model explanation for the barriers faced by people with conditions such as ME, fibromyalgia, Crohn’s disease and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS).
