Social model of disability

Mm-hmm.

And it seems like you're talking a lot about that social model, about who needs to change.

It's not just the medical thing of, "No, you've got something, and you need to fix that, and we're gonna give you medication or therapy or whatever-

Mm-hmm

... uh, speak more on that? 'Cause it seems like you're talking a lot about that.

Y- Yeah.

I mean, I don't think I have a huge background in, like, really the nuance between the medical model and the social model.

Like, I, I do get it.

They are the accessibility theme code leads for the Temerty Faculty of Medicine undergraduate medical curriculum at the University of Toronto.

Together, Audrey and Janet work collaboratively with lived experience community partners, students and faculty, to promote the social model of disability within the undergraduate medical curriculum.

The goal is to ensure the principles of disability justice are included in the MD curriculum in an intersectional way so learners can appreciate the experiences of disability as a natural part of being human.

In this way, Audrey and Janet work towards removing ableism that is viewing disabled as ideal and disability as abnormal.

Mm-hmm.

And just to follow up with what you were saying there, Sarah, one thing that we successfully have integrated into the curriculum four years ago is the teaching of two of the many models of disability that exist, thanks to critical disability scholars around the world.

And this is a contrast of the medical model of disability versus the social model of disability.

This doesn't say, oh, let's just do the social part and not the medical part.

Yeah.

And where I do see a lot of the backlash happening is against anything that touches on kind of the social model of disability.

So for people who don't know, there's kind of this medical model of disability that only looks at what condition do you have? How do we treat it? How do we cure it? And it's a biological phenomenon that's in your body and it's something that's wrong with you.

And that's an aspect of disability, right? But there's also the social aspect or like the identity aspect where if a building isn't built to be accessible to you, if social norms are set up in such a way that the way that your body works means you get ostracized, then you might be more disabled than you would otherwise be because there's this social element in which you're excluded.