Abstract

In three personal reflections, the authors consider the impact of medical model judgements on disabled people’s lives and of professionals’ reluctance to embrace social model thinking. The chapter includes accounts of simulation exercises in nurse training which continue to impose personal tragedy narratives; of Disability Equality Training exercises where non-disabled participants have questioned their requirement to think; and of the devastation caused to a family by the certainty of one professional that his own way of looking and understanding was right. It is observed that while disabled people have for decades now been collectively defining and shaping their own views about the experience and meaning of impairment, these continue to be largely overlooked within professional discourse.