Do I Have to Tell My Patients I’m Blind?

Disability & Society, 2017

In Turkey, the laws which define disability have become increasingly harsh, and require disabled people to be assessed in order to determine 'how disabled' they are. For blind people, as for other disabled people, these assessments have real consequences. This article aims to discuss an appealing piece that arose during a project, which has bearing on how disabled people tend to answer these questions. The participants are legally blind adults. We, as sighted researchers, asked totally blind individuals to describe their vision. Interestingly, they all answered this question without hesitation. The paradoxical nature of this question was only realized during the analysis. We requested the participants to talk about something they do not really know. This might be a reflection of our overvisualized world and might be due to our subtle prejudices. This type of questioning not only has implications for research, but also for assessments of disability in Turkey.

2004

The model of relational development and decline in close relationships and selfdisclosure contains six agents: relational definition, time, attributional processes, liking, reciprocity, and goals. The purpose of the model is to describe the process of relationship development between peers. This phenomenology investigated disclosures between members of a minority group to a member of a majority group in the context of work. Each agent is discussed in terms of commonalities and differences between the agent and the experience of twelve participants with invisible disabilities interviewed.

Critical Disability Discourses Discours Critiques Dans Le Champ Du Handicap, 2012

The dominant assumption about self-disclosure asserts that sharing information about oneself is solely a matter of individual choice. However in the context of identity disclosures, the aspect of self that is being disclosed is attached to the backdrop of the socio-political environment of which the act and agent are situated in. In this regard, it becomes questionable whether people disclosing socially stigmatized and devalued identities such as disability are truly matters of individual freedoms around choice making. This paper aims to highlight how opportunities for discussing experiences and issues involving one's disability identity are limited to formalized institutional spaces or silenced in informal spaces due to the authority of medical cognition around disability within western societies. This lessens the control and authority of disabled people over the way in which disability is understood within the society as a homogenized identity defined through third-party authorities and cannot reflect the complex and nuanced identities formed through lived experiences. By examining the parameters of self-disclosure surrounding opportunities to claim and discuss one's identity with the inclusion of disability(ies), discourses of self-disclosure can be pushed towards informal interpersonal spaces rather than limited formal spaces so as to weaken the attitudinal barriers which form the basis for disabling social structures and creates unequal citizenship.

AMA journal of ethics, 2022

While clinicians, ethicists, and policymakers are increasingly aware that race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and class biases interfere with care provision, disability is not always considered as a confounding factor. This article explores the way embodiment affects personal and professional values. When patients who live with bodies others might not fully comprehend or embrace refuse-or challenge-clinical interventions, they offer real opportunities for clinicians to grasp the central role that embodied experience plays in how patients make health decisions and thereby avoid harming patients or undermining their relationships with patients. The American Medical Association designates this journal-based CME activity for a maximum of 1 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™ available through the AMA Ed Hub TM. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity. Disabled lives are as valid as nondisabled lives, but they are not the same.

Emotion, Space and Society, 2014

This article charts something of the complicated relation between the sighted reader and the articulation of experiences of blindness by the non-sighted and the becoming-blind. This is achieved, firstly, through an analysis of tropes and folk myths derived from Presocratic myths dealing with conceptions of blindness by the sighted, and secondly through related instances of autobiographical writing by blind subjects that explore or explode such tropes. Throughout the article is an underlying notion of empathic vision, or 'feeling seeing'. For, alongside an enduring fascination with what the blind 'see' (e.g. Sacks, 2003), for the sighted reader there is an allied inquisitiveness concerning what the blind feel.

Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 2015

This article reports on a qualitative study identifying the drivers for and boundaries to disability-disclosure in interability interactions as experienced by 13 students with physical impairments at five Belgian higher education institutions. Through surveys and in-depth interviews, the study explored whether the students experience, prefer, and expect differences in communication about their impairments with temporarily able-bodied peers, instructors, and staff. Interviews provided insight into the nuances of disclosure and topic avoidance decisions that differ by disclosure target: disabilitydisclosure is mainly a balancing act between fulfilling physical needs and maintaining a normal, positive identity. The visibility of impairments seems to play a minor role in the students’ initial orientation toward disclosing. The functions of disability-disclosure as posited by the Communication Predicament of Disability Model and the CARE-keys to effective interability communication (i.e., Contact, Ask, Respect, Empathy) are discussed as well as the implications of the findings for Communication Accommodation Theory.

American Medical Association Journal of Ethics -AMAJOE, 2022

While clinicians, ethicists, and policymakers are increasingly aware that race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and class biases interfere with care provision, disability is not always considered as a confounding factor. This article explores the way embodiment affects personal and professional values. When patients who live with bodies others might not fully comprehend or embrace refuse-or challenge-clinical interventions, they offer real opportunities for clinicians to grasp the central role that embodied experience plays in how patients make health decisions and thereby avoid harming patients or undermining their relationships with patients. The American Medical Association designates this journal-based CME activity for a maximum of 1 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™ available through the AMA Ed Hub TM. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity. Disabled lives are as valid as nondisabled lives, but they are not the same.

Social Inclusion , 2018

University students with visual impairment in Israel and worldwide face multiple academic and social barriers and must develop techniques, strategies and skills to adjust to the university environment. The current article is based on a longitudinal qualitative study aimed at incorporating students’ voices and offers some insight into the ways students experience their academic journeys. The research method combined grounded theory with the emancipatory disability research paradigm, which draws explicitly from people with disabilities’ collective experience and thus directly challenges this group’s widespread social oppression. This combination allowed the researcher to focus on students’ initial experiences as subjectively perceived. Sixteen students all defined as legally blind, from four universities in Israel, were interviewed over a 2-year period of their studies. The findings present two complementary narratives the interviewees used while configuring their identities. The article will focus on findings that suggest that during their academic journeys, students needed to manage a process of integrating their identity both as disabled and as students, choosing when and where to perform each identity and determining what the implications of each choice were along with each one’s related costs and benefits. The study’s implications and recommendations can help professionals and support services improve inclusion and equality in higher education.

Nwsa Journal, 2002