ABSTRACT
Although early disability writers such as Paul Hunt (1966) documented the impact of stigma and internalised oppression on the psyche of disabled people, these problems have largely remained as a difficulty for the individual to manage while the disabled people’s movement addressed the more material forms of disadvantage such as exclusion from employment, education and the built environment. It was the labelling of these personal experiences as psycho-emotional disablism which has encouraged sociological analyses of these aspects of social oppression, rather than leaving them in the hands of psychologists and other professionals ‘who would not hesitate to apply the individualistic/personal tragedy model to these issues’ (Thomas 1999: 74).
