Social model of disability
[ch 1: page 7]The TUC and unions subscribe to the social model of disability which, as the Mental Health Foundation says, “proposes that what makes someone disabled is not their medical condition, but the attitudes and structures of society”.
It adds that: “It is a civil rights approach to disability. If modern life was set up in a way that was accessible for people with disabilities then they would not be excluded or restricted. The distinction is made between ‘impairments’, which are the individual problems which may prevent people from doing something, and ‘disability’, which is the additional disadvantage bestowed by a society which treats these ‘impairments’ as abnormal, thus unnecessarily excluding these people from full participation in society. The social model of disability says that it is society which disables impaired people.”
The Mental Health Foundation says that some of the key ways people are disabled by society are prejudice, labelling, ignorance, lack of financial independence, families being over protective and not having information in formats which are accessible to them.
https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/learning-disabilities/a-to-z/s/social-model-disability