Disability - The Number Of Us With Disabilities, Aging And Disability, What Disables Us?, What Disables Our Children?

The history of how human societies have treated their handicapped and disabled members is not a pretty tale. The disabled have often been misunderstood, shunned, locked away, feared, and kept on the margins of society.

With medical advances made during the 20th century, many more people with severe disabilities were saved from an early death, particularly those disabled through injury. For example, of soldiers suffering spinal cord injuries in World War I only 2% survived. By World War II that figure had risen to 85%. The United States was faced with a growing number of disabled people. With the rise of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, a movement for the rights of the disabled began to grow. The movement culminated in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990.

The ADA is intended to provide all disabled people with protection against discrimination and to help them achieve full integration in mainstream society. One important outcome of the legislation was the recognition that more needed to be known about our disabled population. In the early 1990s, new data collection systems were put in place. As more data become available, we will be able to track the progress of the ADA.

The first panels in this chapter measure the disabled population and list the causes of disability both for adult-onset disability and childhood disability. Schools are categorizing an ever-growing number of children as disabled. The fifth panel poses the question: Are more of our children disabled or have definitions of disability changed?

Disabled workers grew 253% between 1970 and 2001. We explore the reasons why in two panels. The next three panels cover the differences in educational attainment and earnings that exist between the disabled and general populations.

We're making progress towards the integration of disabled people into all aspects of society. At the same time, we're labeling more people as disabled, be that for mental disorders, weight problems, or drug addiction. While severely disabled people are finding employment in greater numbers, the number of people on disability is rising. These seeming contradictions are difficult to reconcile. In this chapter we simply present the situation as it is today and try, where possible, to explain how we got here.