Defining Impairment and Disability: issues at stake

The chapter explores the issues that are at stake in these emerging criticisms and suggest that there is still a great deal of mileage to be gained from the social model and that we weaken it at our peril. It outlines the two alternative schemas which have emerged in the articulation of conflicting definitions of chronic illness, impairment and disability. The chapter discusses six issues that, the author suggests, go to the heart of the debate as far as external criticisms from medical sociologists are concerned. It discusses a number of internal criticisms that have emerged from disabled people themselves around the place of impairment, the incorporation of other oppressions and the use and explanatory power of the social model of disability. The chapter suggests that a start can be made towards resolving some of them by focusing on what disabled people would call impairment and medical sociologists would call chronic illness.