Society's Attitude Toward People with Disabilities

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Recommended: My life with disability

Living my life with a brother with disabilities has never been easy. It has been difficult throughout my life watching him grow up and encounter more and more struggles in life because of his disabilities. Our biggest question throughout the years, though, has been what our plan will be for him later in life. How will he live his life as an adult? Will he work? Where will he live? Will he have friends? How happy can he be? People with children with disabilities have to explain, “How do people with disabilities really fit into American society”? It’s not just families discussing this question; experts as well are debating this unknown by looking at the same questions I mentioned before. Looking at where disabled people are living, whether they are working, and the relationships they have with other people are ways to understand how disabled people fit into American society. This topic should not only matter to people close to disabled people, but to everyone. In some way, every one of us is affected by this topic; we want everyone in our family to lead “successful” lives (have a job/have somewhere to live). The same goes for families with people with disabilities. I want to analyze how people with disabilities fit into American society, but this idea of “society” is tricky no matter how you look at it. Then when you question how someone fits into it, the lines get even blurrier. Society is such a broad idea that does not have step-by-step directions on how to fit in since there are so many parts. Everyone fits in differently and has their own idea of how to do this. Although society is confusing, focusing on the main parts of civil society, specifically, makes most. A professor of sociology, Caroline Hodges Persell, wri... ... middle of paper ... ...lyi, Mihaly. "Happiness Revisited." Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. 20-22. Print. Kanner, Leo. "The Era of Institutional Expansion." A history of the care and study of the mentally retarded. Springfield, Ill.: Thomas, 1964. 62-65. Print. McLaughlin, Phillip J., and Paul Wehman. Developmental Disabilities: a Handbook for Best Practices. Boston: Andover Medical Publishers, 1992. Print. Persell, Caroline Hodges, Adam Green, and Liena Gurevich. “Civil Society, Economic Distress, and Social Tolerance.” Sociological Forum 16.2 (2001): 203-230. Web. 3 Dec. 2013. Pitman, Andrea. "The Deinstitutionalization of the Mental Hospitals and the Move to Community Mental Health Centers Focusing on Wisconsin in the 1980s." 2009. Print. “A History of Disability: From 1050 to the Present Day.” English Heritage. n.p., n.d. Web. 4 Dec 2013

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