Recognising lived experience is essential to empowering disabled patients

Disability is not rare: 15% of the world’s population—more than a billion people—are affected by disability, according to the World Health Organization.1I have been researching, campaigning about, and living with disability for my whole life. A person who is born blind, develops autism or schizophrenia in youth, or becomes paralysed in mid-life probably experiences that difference evermore. They get to know their difference and what difference it makes to other people, and encounter barriers and discrimination in daily life. They become “experts by experience” and often activists for a world in which they fit better.Disability usually presents a continuous series of small hurdles, whether bodily or social in nature. Disability is “adversity inoculation,” as psychologists put it. Day by day, we have to surmount difficulties, whether it is falling out of your wheelchair, dropping something, finding your way, or persuading someone to provide you with what you need.Adversity makes you…
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