Disability, Ableism & Ageism

Economic security

How much financial cushion a family or community can offer someone who depends on outside support for care — a cushion that's historically thinnest for people who are disabled, very young, or very old.

Biomedical (medical) model

Frames disability as a defect located inside a person's body or mind — something to diagnose, treat, or cure — with little attention paid to the surrounding environment.

Functional & environmental models

Locate the problem in the mismatch between what a person can do and what their surroundings demand, so the fix is adapting the environment (ramps, assistive technology) rather than curing the person.

Sociopolitical (social) model

Argues that disability is largely manufactured by a society that fails to accommodate difference — the barrier is architectural and attitudinal, not medical.

Biopsychosocial model

A blended lens, tracing back to George Engel, that reads disability as body, mind, and social context overlapping at once — the conceptual root of the WHO's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health.

Polytrauma

Two or more permanent injuries landing on the same person at once — say, a brain injury alongside hearing loss and a lost limb — where the injuries compound each other rather than simply adding up.

Ableism

The stacked deck of attitudes, habits, and policies that quietly treat full physical and mental capacity as the norm, and push people who don't fit that norm out of resources, decision-making, and social standing. The chapter also floats "disableism" as a sharper name for the same thing — and pairs eliminating it with advocacy that can pull in a client's family, peers, and community, not just one-on-one counseling.

"Dilemma of difference" (Minow, 1991)

Naming someone's disability so they can access support risks marking them as "other," but staying silent about it risks leaving real needs unmet — there's no fully clean way out of the bind.

Positive vs. negative discrimination

Schriner & Batavia's split (1995, as cited in the textbook): programs built on purpose to benefit people with disabilities (positive) versus the exclusion and bias the field is simultaneously trying to dismantle (negative) — same word, opposite intent.

Disability-affirmative counseling (D-AT)

Olkin's approach: treat disability as one thread in a client's identity worth respecting rather than a symptom to manage, and track how legal, economic, and political systems shape a client's life, not just their personal coping.

Ageism

Treating someone's age as the main fact about who they are, and ranking some ages as more valuable than others — a bias that lands hardest on children, teens, and elders, the age groups with the least institutional power.

Adultism

The flip side of ageism aimed at the young: assuming kids and teens are unreliable or clueless, then using that assumption to justify adults controlling their choices.

Successful aging

Rowe & Kahn's (1998) three-part bar — avoid disease, keep functioning, stay engaged — increasingly critiqued for assuming access to healthcare, safety, and resources that not every older adult has; Havighurst's (1961) earlier, softer version cared more about making remaining years feel worthwhile than hitting a functional checklist.

Gerontological counselor

A counselor whose practice centers older clients and the families navigating the practical and emotional shifts that come with aging.

Before/while reading

• Complete Reflection 8.1 before starting the chapter reading
• Sit with how disability's meaning shifts across cultures (Activity 8.1)
• Notice how current media portrays people with disabilities (Activity 8.2)
• Work through the "dilemma of difference" and how it might show up with future clients (Reflections 8.2–8.3)
• Take the 8-item aging-myths self-quiz (Build Your Knowledge 8.1) — every one of the 8 statements is false per the textbook's own key
• Name your own attitudes toward age groups and media myths about aging (Reflections 8.4–8.5, Activity 8.4)

Resource directory (Tables 8.2 & 8.4)

Every URL below was live-checked on 2026-07-30 (rows are from the textbook's Table 8.2 ableism/rehabilitation and Table 8.4 ageism resource lists). 28 of 34 are live; the rest are moved, have broken TLS certificates, or are dead — corrected targets are noted where found.