When I talk about the sociology of disability, I mean how people with impairments and society related to each other, causing disabled people if there are environment and attitudinal barriers. This is the social model and I had assumed as the barriers were reduced, so would the number of people with impairments who defined themselves as disabled. But somewhere along the way the efforts to remove barriers, maybe on reflection poorly implemented, has created benefits to being disabled which have caused some people with mild or no impairments to desire the status of disability.

This is like people wanting to be arrested because of a perceived benefit to going to prison, which happens although more frowned upon. Somewhere along the way the social model has gone wrong and now once more people see it has gone wrong, we then have the painful task of putting it right. I would argue this is what the government is trying to do with PIP but we have a long way to go to validate the existence of people with impairments while at the same time stop the desire to be disabled.

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