Shifting the Discourse on Disability: Moving to an Inclusive, Intersectional Focus

Disabled people comprise one of the largest marginalized groups in the United States and experience systemic barriers to healthcare and other critical resources. In Westernized communities, disability has historically been conceptualized via the medical model, which considers disability an individual-level deficit in need of correction. Other models of disability (e.g., social model) have been developed to address the medical model’s ableist shortcomings. However, these frameworks fail to (a) systematically acknowledge that a disabled individual may hold other historically excluded identities (e.g., marginalized racial/ethnic groups, LGBTQIA+ identities) and (b) that these intersecting oppressions may exacerbate health disparities. Intersectionality, which originates from Black feminist literature, describes the ways that systems of power and oppression (e.g., racism, sexism) co-construct and interact to form an individual’s unique experience. To date, the intersection of disability and other marginalized identities has been neglected in psychology and related fields, leaving little guidance for how scholars, clinicians, and other stakeholders can address disability via an intersectional lens. We critically examine existing models of disability and discuss how a disability-affirmative, intersectional approach can address these models’ shortcomings in both theory and practice, as well as enhance the adoption of intersectionality as a strategy for challenging and reforming oppressive systems across the field of psychology. We assert that, ultimately, this approach has the potential to optimize and expand access to equitable, inclusive mental health care, and we propose actionable steps psychologists can take in pursuit of this aim.