Notes

DISABILITIES 1:
Hello, and welcome back. It's likely that during the course of your life you've encountered somebody who's disabled in some way. But it might not have occurred to you to think about what qualifies as a disability and what disabilities exist. That's what we're going to talk about in section one of Disabilities. Now, there are three objectives in this lesson. The first objective is to define disability and describe mental and physical disabilities. The second objective is to examine the challenges individuals with disabilities face. And the third objective is to describe laws and policies designed to accommodate individuals with disabilities. Now, in this section, we're going to be talking about the second objective defining disability and describing mental and physical disabilities. Now, a disability is an impairment, activity limitation, or participation restriction that limits normal activities, that limits the activities that society at large considers normal. Now, we'll talk about what an impairment, activity limitation, or participation restriction is, but I want to first differentiate some vocabulary for you about what it means to have a handicap. A handicap is an inability to accomplish something one might want to do. You do not have to be disabled to have a handicap. I would be handicapped in a situation where I had to speak Japanese. Because I don't know any. But somebody who is disabled may have a handicap, someone who's handicapped may not be disabled. Just so you understand. Now we said a disability was an impairment, activity limitation, or participation restriction that keeps people from doing activities. And so an impairment is a problem in body function or structure. It doesn't work the way that it should. There's activity limitation where it's difficult for an individual to execute a particular task or a participation restriction, which is a problem for an individual in participating in life's situations. Now, what can cause a disability? Well, disability can be caused by congenital conditions, conditions from birth, degenerative diseases can cause disabilities, developmental disorders can cause disabilities, severe injuries especially to the brain can cause disability, and advancing age can also cause disability. So there are many types of disability and we want to focus on mental and physical disabilities. And we're going to talk specifically about vision disabilities, hearing disabilities, motor skill disabilities. And then we're going to talk about developmental disabilities and head injuries. So let's start with visual and vision disabilities. 2.8% of adults over the age of 40 have a severe vision disability and many more have less severe problems. They can be caused by macular degeneration disease in the eyes, glaucoma, diabetes, cataracts, optic nerve atrophy, or damage to the eyes either during development orduring the course of life. And the effects can range between partially sighted, having blurry vision, having color blindness, or being legally blind. Now, there are lots of treatments for vision disabilities depending on the severity of what's going on. And there's a lot of adaptive strategies the people use to compensate for being blind. For instance, having cash money, if you can't see cash money you can't tell one bill from the next. So there's different textures that you can put on it. You can put them in separate bags that have different textures on them. And you learn to feel with your other senses and make up for that lack of site. And you can use Braille, text to speech readers, screen magnifiers, and screen readers to help compensate for that limited vision in electronics, in books, and magazines. And you can use a walking stick to feel your way out in front. There's a lot of different things that you can do in order to help compensate for blindness. And then there's hearing disabilities. And there are 278 million people in the world who suffer from moderate to severe hearing loss up and including deafness. And the causes of hearing disabilities can include loud noises, heredity, otosclerosis which is a hardening of the bones inside the ear which causes sound to no longer transmit through your optic nerves, a puncture in the ear drum, or nerve damage. And the effects can be either conductive hearing issues where the sound doesn't transfer to the nerve or neural hearing issues where the nerve itself, the hearing nerve the auditory nerve, is damaged and no longer transmits messages to the brain. So there are lots of treatments for hearing disabilities. Hearing aids are often used to amplify sounds in the ear and cochlear implants are kind of a newer technology that bypass those damage portions of the ear and directly stimulate the auditory nerve. And they don't allow people to hear as you normally do, but it does allow them to make out a lot more sound and in a slightly different way. And then sign language can also be used for communication between those who have very limited hearing. And usually sign language is used in conjunction with spoken words as well. And then there's motor skill disabilities. And there's a large prevalence of motor skill disabilities, and there's a huge number of categories including fine motor skills, gross motor skills, and speech disorders. Fine motor skills are having dexterity in your fingers and in your hands, the ability to reach things. If you have a fine motor skill disability you can't do that. And gross motor skills are things like walking, running, standing up, and so on. And then speech disorders are a motor skill disability in the mouth where you can't speak properly. And all these things can be caused either by accidents, birth complications, genetic issues, an invalidating disease or a debilitating disease, aging can cause this, as can accidents and amputations especially of limbs. And the effect of motor skill disabilities that you can't do a lot of daily activities or you have to have a part of your body replaced in order to perform those activities. And if you have the inability to perform especially those fine motor functions, you can't write and you can manipulate objects very well so you have to get help doing those things. And the treatment for motor skill disabilities varies vastly depending on what the difficulty is and what the disability has affected. Occupational therapists can help children overcome problems with motor skills especially speech therapy, find dexterity therapy. And special physical therapy can be used to teach muscle group activation to help those who don't have fine control over the limbs to regain it. There's other assisted technology techniques that can be used, such as wheelchairs, false limbs, and so on to help people who have lost the ability to move around in their space and help grant them that mobility back. And then there's developmental disabilities. And this is the first of our mental disabilities. And about 2.3 of the population has a developmental disability. And they vary in severity. And a developmental disability is something that you develop usually before you turn 18, there's some signal or a sign that you have this before you become an adult. It can be caused by genetic issues such as Down syndrome, environmental issues during pregnancy like a poor diet or nutrition or exposure to drugs can cause developmental disabilities, child abuse can cause them, and so can autism. And the effects of a developmental disability are that you have an impairment in your cognitive functioning and a deficit in two or more adaptive behaviors, which means that you can't perform daily activities easily or at all. Developmental disabilities can limit life expectancy and can experience communication issues with others. Now, there's no cures for developmental disabilities and life long supports in many cases are needed. Some of those with developmental disabilities can lead normal healthy lives and some can adapt to life on their own. And the mentally impaired can enjoy life just as much as anybody else can. Just because they have a disability does not limit their ability to enjoy the finer things in life. Then there are head injuries that lead to disability. And this is a reason why you might want to wear a helmet when you're out biking or wear your seat belt when you're in a car. Severe impact or acceleration on the head can result in brain trauma. And that damage can affect your motor skills and your general cognitive functions. So it can give you a physical or a mental disability. And physical therapy can be used to relearn some of those motor skills depending on the severity of the injury and depending on the level of recovery from those injuries. Support and therapy may be required indefinitely. So for our cool down, we talked about physical and mental disabilities. And we talked about how each of them is different and how there's really a wide range of people who you might call disabled. It's not just people who were born that way, but people in the normal course of life can develop disabilities that they have to overcome. So thinking ahead. What challenges do the disabled face in our society?