Health sciences training for disability inclusion: the need to engage with emotion

Material aspects of disability inequality, such as access to quality services, housing and employment, are an urgent, worldwide concern. Less recognised though, are psychological layers of prejudice and discrimination, which play a significant role in cementing marginality. Against this backdrop, health practitioners can fill influential roles in shaping the self-identity and citizenship entitlement of people with disabilities. Yet, these professionals are, like the balance of society, socialised in environments where ableism is intrinsic, invisible and unquestioned. Disability prejudice has both an emotional and unconscious basis, and overcoming its effects is argued to require a personal engagement with feelings relating to bodily frailty, universal dependency, mortality and other prickly aspects of the human condition with which it is associated. These aspects are all at play in the clinical encounter between a health professional and a patient with disability, but the layered and consequential nature of such interactions for the flourishing and empowerment of people with disabilities, as well as the disability movement as a whole, is poorly understood. Evidence suggests that mere tuition in social justice has limited effects on behaviour in relation to issues of inequality and exclusion. In this paper I reflect on how socialisation in an ableist world can shape how disability is positioned in the clinical encounter, potentially leading to interactions which embed inequality. Drawing on my own experience as disability studies scholar and disabled person, I then describe a teaching method for facilitating shifts in the personal relationships which health sciences students have to disability, in the context of broader attempts to create clinical spaces and relationships in which empathy and self-compassion are encouraged.