Elaborate the meaning of disability and disorder
Answers
Answer:
A “disability” is something that happens when someone has a condition that reduces their skills in some area of life that society expects them to have. For example, someone who has broken their back and uses a wheelchair cannot get up stairs in their chair, but society expects that everyone should be able to use stairs. Thus the person with the spinal cord injury has a disability. It’s a social category, focusing on the mismatch between what you can do and what the world expects.
“Disorder” is a more medical category. It implies that there’s something about the body or the brain that isn’t working smoothly. Maybe it’s off-balance; maybe it developed in an atypical way. Disorder implies that the way something’s working isn’t ideal, for whatever reason. It’s closely related to the term “syndrome”, which means a collection of symptoms that often occurs together. So “Autism spectrum disorder” emphasizes the diagnostic and medical aspects of autism—the difficulty with speech or communication, with transitions and novelty, with cognitive flexibility, with sensory processing. “Disorder” tends to cover conditions that aren’t caused by an identifiable injury, so you probably wouldn’t call a spinal cord injury a “disorder”. And “disability” implies long-term, so short-term disorders also wouldn’t be called disabilities.