Why are the disabled usually shunned?

[Ezio]

Why is it in our modern society the disabled, both physically and mentally, generally tend to be shunned/ostracized/bullied?

I mean, if you watch the way a person interacts with someone with Down's Syndrome or in a wheel chair, versus the way they talk to a "normal" person, you will usually see a big difference.

I have two invisible disabilities, one is physical (Ehler's Danlos Syndrome) and one is mental/cognitive (brain damage from birth). If someone meets me before knowing about the LD (Dyscalculia) caused by the brain damage, they are friendly and talkative. After they learn about it, they tend to avoid me.

Is it just some form of primitive instinct to avoid the "sick" one? I work retail so I have seen dozens of "disabled" people (blind, deaf, mobility impaired, Autistic, Down's Syndrome) and the way others treat them.

There is one nice preteen/teen girl who has a developmental disability (probably Autism), she carries around a doll based on a Sesame Street character and polite and very sweet (unlike a lot of girls her age), but yet still has people scuttle away and or act like she is somehow infectious.

[Akasa]

I have dated a man in a wheelchair, my best friend is blind and suffers from a chronic disease that has her hospitalized several times a year, and I suffer from invisible disabilities. I try not to behave any differently to those who have disabilities than I would an able bodied person.

[Duelist925]

From what I've seen, it's a combination of two things for the most part:

Instinct to avoid the sick, interpreted into some...weird ticks around the disabled, and, quite simply, not knowing the "proper" thing to say. People being nervous about mentioning it, not mentioning it, oh god am I staring, kind of shit, which often stems from...well, they just don't know that many disabled people, and so that class remains a sever "other" for them, that they don't know how to act around.

I met a girl in a wheel chair back in September, and she's a pretty good friend now. I admit at first I was...kind of an idiot around her, always worried about staring at her crutches, or later her chair, curious about what caused it but not wanting to offend by asking...I probably acted kinda weird until I got to know her and it clicked in my brain that she was just a really cool chick who happened to have some issues and I needed to calm the fuck down.

[drunkenwildmage]

Allot of it is fear from a result of Ignorance.

Something I had noticed with my late wife, (She was in a wheelchair) is alot of people don't think they know how to act around the disabled, so they try to avoid them for fear of saying/doing something wrong. She, fortunately , had the type of open personality that she could over come that quite a bit. She was able to use the openness to help educate people on her disability, and once they got a understanding of everything, not only did commonly become friends with her, but they also found themselves treating the disabled, in general better, because they didn't have the fear driven ignorance.

[Gravekeeper]

I would say 3 things:

1) Instinctual reaction.
2) Fear of appearing ignorant or fear of unpredictability.
3) Not knowing how to socially interact with the person.

#3 especially in the case of mental disabilities. The average person off the street doesn't know what the social parameters of a disability might be. The layman can't tell the difference between a physical neurological problem like Parkinsons and cognitive disorder that actually impairs learning or social interaction.

In some cases it can take a lot of care and/or expererience to interact with the person in question. Case in point, there's a young autistic girl on my bus route home from work. She's a sweet girl, has a teddy bear stuffed in her backpack and dresses in a more cutesy little girl way than her age. But she has no social restraint. So she'll stand directly next to the bus driver and talk at him/her the entire time despite how dangerous it is.

Some drivers can get her to sit down by being very firm and direct, others get trapped by the distraction as they're not sure how to handle the situation. As she doesn't understand social cues.

[Amanita]

I remember somebody on this forum talking about the downside to political correctness. Namely that people might want to be more inclusive, but they honestly don't know how to reach out, and are afraid to try for fear that they will say or do the wrong thing and cause offense where it wasn't meant.

I think that might play a part in it- people not knowing what the right thing to do is, or how to do it,and fear of causing offense.

[Rageaholic]

I remember somebody on this forum talking about the downside to political correctness. Namely that people might want to be more inclusive, but they honestly don't know how to reach out, and are afraid to try for fear that they will say or do the wrong thing and cause offense where it wasn't meant.

I think that might play a part in it- people not knowing what the right thing to do is, or how to do it,and fear of causing offense.

That's exactly what it is. Of course, a lot of the time when you're trying to say the right thing, you'll end up saying the wrong thing, making things worse than they would have been otherwise.

[Seifer]

Fear of the unknown, perhaps. People tend to shy away from something they don't understand or have never seen before. I'm not sure if I'd go as far as to say that people feel repulsed - more like they're not sure how to react. If there was more education about different disorders (both physical and mental), perhaps more people would know how to act around someone with disabilities.

[bex1218]

I feel bad because I sometimes tend to stare (in general, I am a people watcher). I get over it within a min, and I am still as polite as I can be.

[cindybubbles]

I used to work for a non-profit organisation that helped their clients accommodate employees with disabilities. This company also hired people with disabilities (and the YAST program to which I applied required applicants to have a disability).

Yes, I have autistic tendencies, but I learned that even people with disabilities can be ignorant and discriminate against each other. Even I wasn't immune, as I was told how to communicate and respect the needs of my colleagues, both in the head office and across the branches.

The best part? I learned a few ASL signs for words like "weird", and that Deaf people (the culture, that is), have signed symbols for their names. I also learned not to be afraid of all dogs, since service dogs can be pretty nice to be around with!

[Bardmaiden]

I've been around various disabilities since I was a child, my Aunt was mentally a two/three year old, My grandfather had a bad leg, heart condition and later strokes and my mums friend who I've known since I was nine is in a wheelchair. So I just treat everyone as I find them.

Just because they are in a wheelchair you don't talk down to them/ignore them and talk to the wheelchairs handler (Happened to my sister when her knee problem was bad.) and that people in wheelchairs are just people so they aren't saints for dealing with live in a wheelchair (as some people I've met had the idea of), they are just like you and me and can be just as much of a git and self centred.

So when I worked at cheap as chips store and met a guy who had a few problems I was all hey that's interesting and wow cool (he knows someone on the Paralympics team) and if he dropped his stick I did what I do for my Sister and grabbed it if I was nearby and handed it to him without comment/joked about it when I got to know him a bit better. I think he found it fresh when I just asked out right what his medical problems were rather than tapdancing around the subject

[D_Yeti_Esquire]

I'm not sure if this is a great point or not, but I'll just throw it out there. When we look at how mental disability is treated, it's instructive to remember that just about every civil rights movement went about achieving rights and one that just about every one has in common is making the case that they have no mental disorder or handicap.

Just for funsies I googled "gay/homosexuality is not a mental disorder" and got about 500k results. People of color had to deal with phrenology and pseudoscience for years which was essentially a fun way for white people to feel they had superior mental faculties. It's not uncommon for people even today to assume casually racist views about african american's mental capabilities. And as far as women, there's the reason The Yellow Wallpaper is still read today.

So I think while we have improved the lots of many different groups of people, it has often come on the back of the handicapped, disabled, or diseased.

In the end, it may be simpler to say that as we've progressed people still need bad guys. In the past we've used other races, ethnicities, and sexes. Well, we can't use them anymore so instead what we have is really the only group left that it's absolutely OK to remain largely ignorant about.