How much can a patient be affected by the concept of being a “healthy disable person”?

There is a problematic relationship between disability and illness, and how the perception of the ideology of “global disability”, has led to the deconstruction of the concept of the disabled person. Susan Wendell in “Unhealthy Disabled: Treating Chronic Illnesses as Disabilities”,  reflects on how “people with disabilities are distinguished from those who are sick”. She argues that disabled people do not seek medical treatment to be cured, “they are chronically ill”; they seek treatment so as not to worsen their condition. 

Rea Mukherji, a student at Harvard University, who has conducted studies on disabilities, published a discussion in which she expresses that “the chronically ill do not magically eliminate this illness, but the barriers they face can be broken down” her idea presents a similar idea of Susan Wendell in which chronic illnesses cannot be remedied. Ria Mukherji convey her ideas by mentioning that society must understand that “chronic diseases are invisible, unpredictable, unstable, energy-sapping” and to better provide support to disabled people, society must transmute society’s prejudices and the dilemma with “global disability”.

Wendell introduced the concept of “healthy disable”, a person whose physical conditions and functional inhibitions are relatively stable and prognosticable in the future, endeavoring to denote that not all incapacitated are “unhealthy”, but in Mukherji’s work, she presents a conception that contradicts this by saying that the symptoms of chronic diseases are multi-causal, capricious and unstable, even if they have mobility, sensory and learning impairments sometimes very stable, “chronic diseases fluctuate in severity from one day to the next”.

One of the conflicts Wendell exposes in the analysis of incapacitation is the “age division of the sick”. Chronically ill young and median-age people inhabit a category that is recondite or accepted. According to Wendell, ” adolescent people are considered too puerile to be sick for the rest of our lives”, and it is already known who has a chronic illness from which they do not have to seek either “cure or recovery”, and this leads to people soon refusing  to be able to return to life afore the illness if they were not already born with a disability.  

Through this conflict mentioned in the previous paragraph, Mukherji has an almost similar conception in which she presents that workplaces and educational institutions need to understand “the nature of chronic disease”, which engenders barriers for disabled young people that create a barrier to access education and employment. “The chronically ill are far from having opportunities with an equitable background” she mentions. Students with chronic illnesses are often forced to miss classes, fall behind in coursework, and find it arduous to maintain good grades everything becomes even more complicated; in addition to facing periods of absences that last for months or years, which can take a tremendous emotional and financial toll. Another thing that is affected by being an adolescent person with an incapacitation is that “they often begin to miss social engagements, which exposes them to a special risk of isolation and solitude.” One study found that adolescent adults with chronic illnesses are only half as liable to graduate from college as their salubrious peers: 18% versus 32% (Maslow et al., 2011). Even if they graduate “one of the psychological distresses that being chronically ill brings with it is having to deal with a lack of employment” (Murkheriji). This can exacerbate the pressure on those who are already chronically ill, ill health can be not only a cause of unemployment for the chronically ill but additionally, an effect, which sometimes affects adolescent sufferers greatly as they still probe for a future and hope. And in order to alleviate these problems, Wendell presents conceptions that “activist movements have equipped to match the energy expenditure”, to work only on the good days or more gradually on days when we are very deplorable. The idea explains that it’s possible to work in teams so that someone else can pick up the slack when they can’t work at all. “We may have to send an indicated verbalization to a meeting to be read by someone else, meeting for someone else to read because we are too sick to attend and read it in person”. She specifies that to manage a world in which incapacitated people can work you require to be understood by those that our absence does not mean they are not committed to their work. 

People who suffer from disabilities suffer from its effects that “have not only focus on the medically based descriptions of their bodies minds” (Wendell, 1996) but additionally the experiences of their minds over time and depending on their medical astringency to the different circumstances they face, the effects it has on their activities, the feelings it engenders, and any concerns about themselves or their family members, create this cycle of having poor mental health and being perceived as  sicker than they are.  One of these concerns that an individual may have is that society visually perceives “coping as suspicion”, being a chronically ill person brings with it “suspicion about how sick or incapacitated we are.”(Murkheriji), about how or why they are sick, whether they are following treatment and doing everything they can to get well, and about how the mismanagement of our lives, minds or souls may be contributing to our remaining sickness (Wendell 1996). 

In conclusion, Wendell’s text which is writing from her own experiences, introduced the concept that not all incapacitated people are insalubrious and viewing it through the conceptions of Rea Mukherji and the lens of her research on how society perceives incapacitated people and how they feel because of this perception, leads me to compose and think about these big questions such as Are incapacitated people not authentically probing for a cure? How can young people perpetuate their life when incapacitated, what possibilities do they have to do “common” things? Why does society perceive them as suspected of having a condition, and to what extent can mental health make an illness worse?

Mukherji, Rea Chronic illness is not widely viewed as a disability. this needs to change. HGSE Office of Student Affairs. (n.d.).RetrievedNovember01,2022, from https://osa.gse.harvard.edu/chronic-illness-not-widely-viewed-disability-needs-change

Google. (n.d.). Wendell from DSR.pdf. Google Drive. Retrieved November 01, 2022, from https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VAbr_3NVpq3B-XpnZrulu7v1aHrgBaZi/view