Category Archives: Disability

Sick, broke and waiting for the disability support pension

Posted on by

A Senate inquiry has been told Australia’s disability payment rules need to be ‘rewritten’ as people struggle for months, or even years, before receiving support – with some draining their super, relying on charity or accruing thousands of dollars of credit card debt to get by. Many are also forced onto the lower jobseeker payment, with government data showing that 36% of jobseeker recipients are sick or have a disability.

Laura Murphy-Oates speaks to 28-year-old Natasha Thomson, whose two-year battle to access the payment ended up at the top level of the administrative appeal tribunal, and inequality editor Luke Henriques-Gomes, about the barriers to accessing the disability support pension and the push for reform

You can also read:

Continue reading...

Holiday homes for disabled people face closure due to England’s vaccines mandate

Posted on by

Charity says Covid policy is having ‘devastating consequences’ for sector already in crisis

Some of England’s only holiday homes for disabled people in care are facing closure due to the policy that means all staff must be fully vaccinated against coronavirus.

The charity, Revitalise, said England’s vaccines mandate for care homes was having “devastating consequences” for a sector already in crisis.

Continue reading...

Dennis Billups: he helped lead a long, fiery sit-in – and changed disabled lives

Posted on by

Blinded by medical intervention as a baby, Billups became one of the leaders of a groundbreaking, world-shaking 1977 protest. He talks about what drives him and why Barack Obama loves his energy

“My mother used to tell us we had to be really good,” says Dennis Billups. “There were always two strikes against us – so you had to hit the third strike out of the park.” The “strikes” were being Black and being blind. And growing up in San Francisco in the 1960s and 70s, both were potential sources of open discrimination. “There were times when, even walking in our own neighbourhood, we would get: ‘You’re supposed to stay inside.’ ‘Don’t you have a dog?’ ‘Don’t you have a cane?’” At times this could turn physical. “Some neighbours would turn water on us and stuff like that.” Finding employment was also a challenge. “Being blind, they didn’t have to do too much except say: ‘We’re not going to hire you,’ or: ‘We don’t think you can do this.’ So it was a glass ceiling, more or less. I’m sure with my twin sister there was a lot more, being a woman, African American and blind as well, but she was a hell of a fighter.”

Billups is a fighter, too, albeit one whose principal weapons are determination, congeniality, optimism – and a mellifluous voice. Now in his late 60s, speaking on Zoom from the San Francisco public library, he still radiates an infectious positivity that helped him as a young man when he played a key role in a lesser-known battle for civil rights.

Continue reading...

Father, 86, dies trying to rescue disabled daughter from canal

Posted on by

Lawrence Casey went into Bude canal in Cornwall after daughter Jessica lost control of mobility scooter

An 86-year-old man has died while attempting to rescue his disabled daughter from a canal.

Lawrence Casey went into Bude canal in north Cornwall to rescue his daughter Jessica after she suddenly lost control of her mobility scooter and plunged into the water.

Continue reading...

Lucy Dawson: the model who got a mystery headache, a misdiagnosis – and a new mission in life

Posted on by

When she began experiencing head pain as a student, Dawson was diagnosed with a breakdown and sectioned. She actually had encephalitis. Five years on, now paralysed in one leg, she is speaking out for disability rights

Lucy Dawson was skating through life. Everything came so easily to her: she had friends, confidence, academic success. At the age of 20, she was studying criminology at the University of Leicester, determined to join the police. Then, in the summer of 2016, she got a terrible headache that refused to go away.

The headache was to change Dawson’s life. It took almost four months for her to be diagnosed with autoimmune encephalitis, an acute inflammation of the brain that leaves many people with permanent brain damage and has a mortality rate of about one in 10. She was showing classic symptoms of encephalitis from the off (confusion, personality change, hallucinations and the headaches) which should have been spotted within a couple of days.

Continue reading...

Swimming superstar Ellie Cole on diversity, accessibility and bringing people joy

Posted on by

The six-time gold medallist is campaigning for WeThe15 – a global human rights movement that will feature at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics

Ellie Cole is a bonafide Australian sporting champion. Yet as other women athletes, or sportspeople of colour, or other minorities can attest, success is no shield sometimes.

Related: Tokyo 2020 Paralympics briefing: two more weeks of glory and despair

Continue reading...

Thomas Quasthoff: ‘From birth, my mum felt guilty. I had to show her I made the best of my life’

Posted on by

Born disabled due to the effects of Thalidomide, the exuberant star rose to classical music’s pinnacle – then quit at the peak of his powers. Now he’s back – singing jazz

Thomas Quasthoff has been retired from classical music for nearly a decade now. The German bass-baritone was in his early 50s when he made the shock announcement – an age when singers of his type are still in their prime. His elder brother Michael had been diagnosed with lung cancer in 2010, and that diagnosis and his brother’s subsequent death had left Quasthoff temporarily physically incapable of singing.


“Three days after being told that my brother would not live longer than nine months I lost my voice,” he recalls. “Doctors looked at my throat and said: ‘Everything is fine.’ But my heart was broken, and if the heart is broken ...” he pauses. “The voice is the mirror of the soul.”


Continue reading...

‘Hidden pandemic’: Peruvian children in crisis as carers die

Posted on by

With 93,000 children in Peru losing a parent to Covid, many face depression, anxiety and poverty

When Covid-19 began shutting down Nilda López’s vital organs, doctors decided that the best chance of saving her and her unborn baby was to put her into a coma.

Six months pregnant, López feared she would not wake up, or that if she did, her baby would not be there.

Continue reading...

How the ‘art of the insane’ inspired the surrealists – and was twisted by the Nazis

Posted on by

The author of an acclaimed new book tells how Hitler used works by psychiatric patients in his culture war

On a winter’s day in 1898, a stocky young man with a handlebar moustache was hurrying along the banks of a canal in Hamburg, north Germany. Franz Karl Bühler was in a panic, fleeing a gang of mysterious agents who had been tormenting him for months. There was only one way to escape, he thought. He must swim for it. So he plunged into the dark water, close to freezing at this time of year, and struck out for the far side. When he was hauled on to the bank, soaked and shivering, it became clear to passersby that there was something odd about the man. There was no sign of his pursuers. He was confused, perhaps insane. So he was taken to the nearby Friedrichsberg “madhouse”, as it was known then, and taken inside. He would remain in the dubious care of the German psychiatric system for the next 42 years, one of hundreds of thousands of patients who lived near-invisible lives behind the asylum walls.

Bühler’s incarceration disturbed him, but it also marked the beginning of a remarkable story, one in which he played a leading role. It reveals the debt art owes to mental illness, and the way that connection was used to wage history’s most destructive culture war.

Continue reading...

‘Deaf is not a costume’: Marlee Matlin on surviving abuse and casting authentically

Posted on by

The only deaf actor to win an Academy Award discusses going to rehab, speaking out about William Hurt and starring in deaf drama Coda

When early financial backers of Marlee Matlin’s new film, Coda, expressed their preference for hiring big-name actors to play the roles of two major deaf characters – her onscreen husband and son – she threatened to quit. She told them that deaf actors should play characters written as deaf. “I said: time out. This is not right. It’s not authentic and it’s not going to work. If you go down that route, I’m out, because I don’t want to be part of that effort of faking deaf. I’m glad they listened.”

I can’t imagine anyone not listening to Matlin. Speaking from her home in Los Angeles, she is funny and warm, but there is something intense about her, almost intimidating. She sits straight-backed, her focus sharp. She is not a woman to mince her words – which are translated from American Sign Language (ASL) by her longtime interpreter and producing partner, Jack Jason, who is also on the call from his front room. The pair have been working together since 1985, just before she won the best actress Oscar at 21 for her first film role, playing a young deaf woman in the 1986 drama Children of a Lesser God – beating Sigourney Weaver (who was up for Aliens), Jane Fonda, Kathleen Turner and Sissy Spacek.

Continue reading...

Comic Jamie MacDonald on being creative and blind: ‘It’s triumph with – not over – adversity’

Posted on by

In new BBC show Blind Ambition, MacDonald and Jamie O’Leary meet artists who have lost their sight – including a rapper, a photographer and a wood turner ‘who still has all his fingers’

I’m a blind standup comedian, currently co-starring in the BBC Two documentary Blind Ambition. As the title suggests, the show is about blindness. But please don’t think this is a violins, tissues at the ready, “oh didn’t they do well” type of documentary. The show creator and Essex wide boy Jamie O’Leary wanted to make a different kind of show about disability.

You’ll know the classic disabled show formula: person has a dark phase then overcomes their disability and achieves something wonderful. In this paradigm the disability is a hurdle that needs to be jumped over. Or, if there are mobility issues at play, an obstacle to get around. In the Blind Ambition paradigm, blindness – a disability readers of the New York Times voted the worst thing a person could have in the world (which is bollocks as blind people can’t read the flipping New York Times so couldn’t vote) – is positive.

Continue reading...

End to Covid rules for England ‘leaves 3.8m vulnerable people feeling abandoned’

Posted on by

Charities warn that shift on 19 July to personal choice on virus precautions is instilling fear in many most at risk

Cancer patients, disabled people and other clinically extremely vulnerable groups say they will feel unsafe stepping the house after hearing that mask and social distancing requirements are to be abandoned, charities have warned.

Campaigners estimate that 3.8 million people have been left feeling abandoned by the government’s shift towards promoting “personal responsibility” as the sole means of navigating the surging Covid-19 infection rates in England.

Continue reading...

England’s ‘freedom day’ to be day of fear for elderly people, charities warn

Posted on by

Vulnerable and immunocompromised people anxious about 19 July end to Covid rules

Boris Johnson’s “freedom day” will be a day of fear for elderly and vulnerable people and those with compromised or suppressed immune systems, for whom the efficacy of vaccines is much reduced, charities have warned.

Citing the statement by the new health secretary, Sajid Javid, that Covid infections could surge to a record 100,000 a day in a few weeks after all social distancing and mask-wearing regulations are removed in England, Blood Cancer UK has said that 19 July “will be the day that it feels like freedoms are being taken away from” many people.

Continue reading...

After Britney Spears testimony, lawmakers push changes to conservatorship laws

Posted on by

Disability rights activists say proposed reforms don’t go far enough and that flaws in the system trap people in abusive arrangements

Last week, Britney Spears testified in court about the conservatorship that has long controlled her life, and noted there were a thousand people stuck in “abusive” arrangements like hers.

In California, lawmakers have responded to the international outcry about the singer’s peculiar legal arrangement with proposed reforms that aim to expand the rights and due process of people in conservatorships.

Continue reading...

Hungary’s LGBT protests and Juneteenth Day: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

Posted on by

A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms from China to Colombia

Continue reading...

‘Disability is possibility’: a mission to bust myths in India – photo essay

Posted on by

The photographer Vicky Roy has been travelling around the country documenting people with disabilities. The project, Everyone is Good at Something, hopes to tell their stories and challenge the stigma they face

  • Photographs by Vicky Roy

When he isn’t working on the farm or making things out of jute, Gobinda Majumdar likes to walk to a tea stall near his home in Assam to buy sweets for his nieces. All this he explains with tactile signing, the only means of communication for the 37-year-old, who cannot speak and has no hearing or sight.

Born deaf, Majumdar then went blind at the age of two after contracting rubella. Life has its challenges but he hopes to find a wife. “My younger brother is married so why not me?” he told the photographer Vicky Roy, who visited him in Kamrup district as part of a project to share stories of people with disabilities in rural India.

Continue reading...

Normalising special needs: the Kabul school offering hope

Posted on by

Fatima Khalil school has given some children the first taste of education – and love – in their lives

Laughter and excited chatter burst out of the colourfully painted classrooms. In a quiet garden schoolhouse amid the jam-packed Afghan capital, Kabul, pupils run around, study and play in the country’s first official school for children with disabilities.

It’s a far cry from what most of these children have previously experienced. For many, it’s the first time in their lives they feel loved and accepted.

Continue reading...

‘Like losing a hand’: musicians on the crisis in hearing loss

Posted on by

Oscar-nominated film Sound of Metal depicts a drummer battling hearing loss. As rock stars like Myles Kennedy explain, it’s a debilitating and worryingly widespread problem

The Bafta-winning film Sound of Metal dramatises every musician’s worst nightmare. Ruben Stone, played by Riz Ahmed – who is up for a best actor Oscar this weekend – is a metal drummer who loses his hearing, and the film depicts Ruben’s loss exactly as he hears it, where the world around him and the intense music he plays suddenly fade to a muted and distorted drone.

These scary and involving scenes have highlighted a crisis in hearing damage right across the music industry, be it through deafness or tinnitus (a constant ringing in the ears). In a report published last month by the British Tinnitus Association (BTA), over half of the 74 tinnitus-suffering musicians surveyed said they developed the condition due to noise exposure, but nearly a quarter said they never wore hearing protection.

Continue reading...

‘My son could die’: the disabled Syrian refugees on the sharp end of UK aid cuts – photo essay

Posted on by

Two centres in Lebanon are among the casualties of cuts to British aid, with devastating consequences for thousands of patients and families

In January, the British government told its diplomats to start finding 50–70% cuts in aid funding. In March, it was revealed it was slashing aid funding to Syrian refugee projects by a third. Among the many casualties of those cuts is a project in Lebanon.

Two centres – in Zahlé and in Beirut – offer specialised services, such as speech and physiotherapy, for disabled Syrian refugees who can’t afford to pay for them.

Continue reading...

‘I am a woman who wants’: on disability and desire

Posted on by

Cerebral palsy made my body a country of error and pain. It took me years to accept the part of me that craves intimacy

The autumn I was 19, I entered my college dining hall in California just in time to overhear a boy telling a table of mutual acquaintances that he thought I was very nice, but he felt terribly sorry for me because I was going to die a virgin. This was already impossible, but in that moment all that mattered was the blunt force of the boy’s certainty. He hadn’t said he could never … or “She might be pretty, but” … or “Can she even have sex?” or even “I’d never fuck a cripple” – all sentences I’d heard or overheard by then. What he had done was, firmly, with some weird, wrong breed of kindness in his voice, drawn a border between my body and the country of desire.

It didn’t matter that, by then, I’d already done my share of heated fumbling in narrow dorm-room beds; that more than one person had already looked at me and said: “I’m in love with you,” and I had said it back. It didn’t matter that I’d boldly kissed a boy on his back porch in sixth grade, surprising him so much that the BB gun he was holding went off, sending a squadron of brown squirrels skittering up into the trees. Most of me was certain that the boy in the dining hall was right in all the ways that really mattered. He knew I’d never be the kind of woman anyone could really want, and I knew that even my body’s own wanting was suspect and tainted by flaw. My body was a country of error and pain. It was a doctor’s best attempt, a thing to manage and make up for. It was a place to leave if I was hunting goodness, happiness or release.

Continue reading...