In 2021, persons with a disability accounted for 11.9 percent of the civilian noninstitutional population. Persons with a disability tend to be older than persons with no disability, reflecting the increased incidence of disability with age. Libraries have long been committed to serving the entire community. Library services for disabled people require providing access to the facilities, collections, and programs (Bureau of Labor Statistics).
The American Library Association recognizes that people with disabilities are a large and neglected minority in the community and are severely under-represented in the library profession. Disabilities cause many personal challenges. In addition, many people with disabilities face economic inequity, illiteracy, cultural isolation, and discrimination in education, employment and the broad range of societal activities.
Libraries play a catalytic role in the lives of people with disabilities by facilitating their full participation in society. Libraries should use strategies based upon the principles of universal design to ensure that library policy, resources and services meet the needs of all people (Admin, 2016 ALA).
Sections:
Invisible/Internal: Autism, Bipolar disorder, Blindness, Cancer, Deafness, Diabetes, Epilepsy, HIV Infection, Intellectual disabilities, Major Depressive disorder, Obsessive-compulsive disorder, Post-traumatic stress disorder, Schizophrenia
Visible/External: Cerebral Palsy, Mobility Impairments, Partial/Completely missing limbs, Multiple Sclerosis, Muscular Dystrophy
Invisible/Internal
Autism
The Western Disease by ISBN: 9780226772257Publication Date: 2021-06-04Because autism is an increasingly common diagnosis, North Americans are familiar with its symptoms and treatments. But what we know and think about autism is shaped by our social relationship to health, disease, and the medical system. In The Western Disease Claire Laurier Decoteau explores the ways that recent immigrants from Somalia to Canada and the US make sense of their children's diagnosis of autism.
War on Autism by ISBN: 9780472053124Publication Date: 2016-04-30Autism is widely understood in contemporary times as nothing more than a biomedical disorder in need of treatment and/or cure. War on Autism disrupts this singularity by examining autism as a historically specific and power-laden cultural phenomenon that has much to teach about the social organization of a neoliberal western modernity.
Bipolar Disorder
Bipolar by ISBN: 9780128192566Publication Date: 2021-04-30It is estimated that as many as fifty percent of patients initially diagnosed with major Unipolar depression (UP, MDD) will subsequently incur a manic episode or discover a past subtle episode and will have had Bipolar depression rather than MDD. The average Bipolar individual suffers with episodic symptoms for ten years before receiving an accurate diagnosis. As many as 16 million individuals in the United States will have a Bipolar episode in their lives, diagnosed or not. With the recognition of these growing numbers of patients with a Bipolar Disorder, it is imperative that patients are diagnosed and treated earlier, accurately and efficiently.
Lithium by ISBN: 9781631491993Publication Date: 2019-08-13The DNA double helix, penicillin, the X-ray, insulin--these are routinely cited as some of the most important medical discoveries of the twentieth century. And yet, the 1949 discovery of lithium as a cure for bipolar disorder is perhaps one of the most important--yet largely unsung--breakthroughs of the modern era. In Lithium, Walter Brown, a practicing psychiatrist and professor at Brown, reveals two unlikely success stories: that of John Cade, the physician whose discovery would come to save an untold number of lives and launch a pharmacological revolution, and that of a miraculous metal rescued from decades of stigmatization.
Blindness
Being Seen by ISBN: 9781982152376Publication Date: 2021-10-26A Deafblind writer and professor explores how the misrepresentation of disability in books, movies, and TV harms both the disabled community and everyone else. As a Deafblind woman with partial vision in one eye and bilateral hearing aids, Elsa Sjunneson lives at the crossroads of blindness and sight, hearing and deafness--much to the confusion of the world around her.
Sight Unseen by ISBN: 9780231172905Publication Date: 2015-04-28Sight Unseen reveals the cultural and biological realities of race, gender, and sexual orientation from the perspective of the blind. Through ten case studies and dozens of interviews, Ellyn Kaschak taps directly into the phenomenology of race, gender, and sexual orientation among blind individuals, along with the everyday epistemology of vision. Kaschak's work reveals not only how the blind create systems of meaning out of cultural norms but also how cultural norms inform our conscious and unconscious interactions with others regardless of our physical ability to see.
Cancer
The Cancer Journals by ISBN: 9781879960268Publication Date: 1980-10-01Originally published in 1980, Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals offers a profoundly feminist analysis of her experience with breast cancer & a modified radical mastectomy. Moving between journal entry, memoir, & exposition, Lorde fuses the personal & political & refuses the silencing & invisibility that she experienced both as a woman facing her own death & as a woman coping with the loss of her breast. After Lorde died of cancer in 1992, women from all over the U.S. & beyond paid tribute to her in essays & poems.
A History of Lung Cancer by ISBN: 9781403988027Publication Date: 2013-11-20The first comprehensive history of lung cancer from around 1800 to the present day; a story of doctors and patients, hopes and fears, expectations and frustrations. Where most histories of medicine focus on progress, Timmermann asks what happens when medical progress does not seem to make much difference.
Deafness
Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India by ISBN: 9780813570600Publication Date: 2015-06-30Although it is commonly believed that deafness and disability limits a person in a variety of ways, Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India describes the two as a source of value in postcolonial India. Michele Friedner argues that the experiences of deaf people offer an important portrayal of contemporary self-making and sociality under new regimes of labor and economy in India. Friedner contends that deafness actually becomes a source of value for deaf Indians as they interact with nongovernmental organizations, with employers in the global information technology sector, and with the state.
The Legal Recognition of Sign Languages by ISBN: 9781788924009Publication Date: 2019-06-17This book presents the first ever comprehensive overview of national laws recognising sign languages, the impacts they have and the advocacy campaigns which led to their creation. It comprises 18 studies from communities across Europe, the US, South America, Asia and New Zealand. They set sign language legislation within the national context of language policies in each country and show patterns of intersection between language ideologies, public policy and deaf communities' discourses.
Diabetes
Diabetes by ISBN: 9780300228991Publication Date: 2020-08-05Who gets diabetes and why? An in‑depth examination of diabetes in the context of race, public health, class, and heredity "[An] unsettling but insightful social history."--Kirkus Reviews "The important lessons of Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease may strengthen organized medicine's commitment to addressing social determinants of health and equity."--David Goldberg, Health Affairs Who is considered most at risk for diabetes, and why? In this thorough, engaging book, historian Arleen Tuchman examines and critiques how these questions have been answered by both the public and medical communities for over a century in the United States. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Tuchman describes how at different times Jews, middle‑class whites, American Indians, African Americans, and Hispanic Americans have been labeled most at risk for developing diabetes, and that such claims have reflected and perpetuated troubling assumptions about race, ethnicity, and class.
Managing Diabetes by ISBN: 9781479835287Publication Date: 2019-06-25A critical study of diabetes in the popular imagination Over twenty-nine million people in the United States, more than nine percent of the population, have some form of diabetes. In Managing Diabetes, Jeffrey A. Bennett focuses on how the disease is imagined in public culture. Bennett argues that popular anecdotes, media representation, and communal myths are as meaningful as medical and scientific understandings of the disease.
Epilepsy
Epilepsy by ISBN: 9781107035379Publication Date: 2017-04-06This comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to epilepsy compares and contrasts scientific knowledge, clinical experience and social consciousness between Western and non-Western cultures, enhancing transcultural understanding and providing a paradigm for an integrative, truly global health policy for this disorder.
Representing Epilepsy by ISBN: 1846316170Publication Date: 2013-06-20At least 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy. Representing Epilepsy, the latest volume in LUP's acclaimed Representations series, seeks to understand the epileptic body as a literary or figurative device intelligible beyond a medical framework. Jeannette Stirling argues that neurological discourse from the late-nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century is as much forged by the cultural conditions and representational politics of the times as it is by the science of western medicine.
HIV Infection
Holding On by ISBN: 9780803269613Publication Date: 2016-06-01In Holding On anthropologist Alyson O'Daniel analyzes the abstract debates about health policy for the sickest and most vulnerable Americans as well as the services designated to help them by taking readers into the daily lives of poor African American women living with HIV at the advent of the 2006 Treatment Modernization Act. At a time when social support resources were in decline and publicly funded HIV/AIDS care programs were being re-prioritized, women's daily struggles with chronic poverty, drug addiction, mental health, and neighborhood violence influenced women's lives in sometimes unexpected ways.
HIV/AIDS, Health and the Media in China by ISBN: 9780415471985Publication Date: 2011-03-10Approximately 90% of urban HIV/AIDS education in China occurs indirectly through non-specialist media reports. Many of these reports use images of extreme suffering and poverty to communicate an understanding of who gets HIV, why and how. This book explores an important aspect of how HIV/AIDS is communicated in China's print media, posters, websites and television, suggesting that its association with Africa and Africans - portrayed as a distant and backward land and people - has impacted understandings of HIV/AIDS. It demonstrates how, in China's media, Africans are frequently used to embody the most extreme possibilities of poverty and disease, in contrast with the progressive, scientifically sophisticated Han Chinese, which has encouraged the urban public to develop 'imagined immunity' to HIV.
HIV Prevention with Latinos by ISBN: 9780199764303Publication Date: 2012-07-02According to the 2010 U.S. Census, Latinos now comprise 16% of the general population as they continue to be one of the fastest-growing populations in the United States. However, according to recent CDC data, Latinos also account for a disproportionately high number of total new AIDS cases.Rates of AIDS among U.S. Latinos are second only to African Americans, and about 3.5-times higher than for non-Hispanic Whites. Vulnerability to HIV/AIDS increases with ethnic and racial minority status that is so often conflated with socioeconomic status.Additional factors, such as gender, sexual orientation, and stigma, also increase vulnerability to HIV/AIDS and require us to think comprehensively about the unique structural-environmental, social and cultural factors that frame risk for HIV for U.S. Latinos.
Intellectual Disabilities
Mind Thief by ISBN: 9780231198707Publication Date: 2021-03-02Alzheimer's disease, a haunting and harrowing ailment, is one of the world's most common causes of death. Alzheimer's lingers for years, with patients' outward appearance unaffected while their cognitive functions fade away. Patients lose the ability to work and live independently, to remember and recognize. There is still no proven way to treat Alzheimer's because its causes remain unknown. Mind Thief is a comprehensive and engaging history of Alzheimer's that demystifies efforts to understand the disease. Beginning with the discovery of "presenile dementia" in the early twentieth century, Han Yu examines over a century of research and controversy.
Intellectual Disability by ISBN: 9781526125323Publication Date: 2018-01-04This collection explores the historical origins of our modern concepts of intellectual or learning disability. The essays, from some of the leading historians of ideas of intellectual disability, focus on British and European material from the Middle Ages to the late-nineteenth century and extend across legal, educational, literary, religious, philosophical and psychiatric histories. They investigate how precursor concepts and discourses were shaped by and interacted with their particular social, cultural and intellectual environments, eventually giving rise to contemporary ideas. The collection is essential reading for scholars interested in the history of intelligence, intellectual disability and related concepts, as well as in disability history generally.
Major Depressive Disorder
Major Depression in Women by ISBN: 9781604562125Publication Date: 2008-05-01Major depression is a serious medical illness affecting 5 to 8 percent of the adult population in a given year. Unlike normal emotional experiences of sadness, loss, or passing mood states, major depression is persistent and can significantly interfere with an individual's thoughts, behaviour, mood, activity, and physical health. Among all medical illnesses, major depression is the leading cause of disability in the U.S. and many other developed countries.
The Movement for Global Mental Health by ISBN: 9789463721622Publication Date: 2021-04-08In The Movement for Global Mental Health: Critical Views from South and Southeast Asia, prominent anthropologists, public health physicians, and psychiatrists respond sympathetically but critically to the Movement for Global Mental Health (MGMH). They question some of its fundamental assumptions: the idea that "mental disorders" can clearly be identified; that they are primarily of biological origin; that the world is currently facing an "epidemic" of them; that the most appropriate treatments for them normally involve psycho-pharmaceutical drugs; and that local or indigenous therapies are of little interest or importance for treating them.
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
World of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, by ISBN: 9781479881406Publication Date: 2022-01-11Beyond trivialization and misunderstanding, the realities of people experiencing OCD Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) affects millions of people worldwide and looms large in popular culture, for instance when people quip about being "so OCD." However, this sometimes has little relation to the actual experiences of people diagnosed with the disorder. In The World of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Dana Fennell explores the lives of people who have OCD, giving us fresh insight into a highly misunderstood, trivialized, and sometimes stigmatized mental disorder that has no surefire cure.
Everything Is an Emergency by ISBN: 9780062950079Publication Date: 2020-06-30New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "A brilliant, honest, necessary book that exposes the intricacies of the human brain while showing us the way creativity and friendship can anchor us. This is a must-read for anyone who has ever wondered if they see the world a little differently." -Ada Limón A New Yorker cartoonist illustrates his lifelong struggle with OCD in cartoon vignettes frank and funny Jason Adam Katzenstein is just trying to live his life, but he keeps getting sidetracked by his over-active, anxious brain. Mundane events like shaking hands or sharing a drink snowball into absolute catastrophes. Jason has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, a mental illness that compels him to perform rituals in order to protect himself from dangers that don't really exist.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
PTSD by ISBN: 9781421426402Publication Date: 2018-09-03A comprehensive history of PTSD. Post-traumatic stress disorder--and its predecessor diagnoses, including soldier's heart, railroad spine, and shell shock--was recognized as a psychiatric disorder in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The psychic impacts of train crashes, wars, and sexual shocks among children first drew psychiatric attention. Later, enormous numbers of soldiers suffering from battlefield traumas returned from the world wars. It was not until the 1980s that PTSD became a formal diagnosis, in part to recognize the intense psychic suffering of Vietnam War veterans and women with trauma-related personality disorders.
The Body Keeps the Score by ISBN: 9780143127741Publication Date: 2015-09-08#1 New York Times bestseller "Essential reading for anyone interested in understanding and treating traumatic stress and the scope of its impact on society." --Alexander McFarlane, Director of the Centre for Traumatic Stress Studies A pioneering researcher transforms our understanding of trauma and offers a bold new paradigm for healing in this New York Times bestseller Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence.
Schizophrenia
The Protest Psychosis by ISBN: 9780807001271Publication Date: 2011-04-12A powerful account of how cultural anxieties about race shaped American notions of mental illness The civil rights era is largely remembered as a time of sit-ins, boycotts, and riots. But a very different civil rights history evolved at the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan. In The Protest Psychosis, psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl tells the shocking story of how schizophrenia became the diagnostic term overwhelmingly applied to African American protesters at Ionia-for political reasons as well as clinical ones. Expertly sifting through a vast array of cultural documents, Metzl shows how associations between schizophrenia and blackness emerged during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s-and he provides a cautionary tale of how anxieties about race continue to impact doctor-patient interactions in our seemingly postracial America.
A Disability of the Soul by ISBN: 9780801451928Publication Date: 2013-06-13Bethel House, located in a small fishing village in northern Japan, was founded in 1984 as an intentional community for people with schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders. Using a unique, community approach to psychosocial recovery, Bethel House focuses as much on social integration as on therapeutic work. As a centerpiece of this approach, Bethel House started its own businesses in order to create employment and socialization opportunities for its residents and to change public attitudes toward the mentally ill, but also quite unintentionally provided a significant boost to the distressed local economy.
Visible/External
Cerebral palsy
The Pretty One by ISBN: 9781982100544Publication Date: 2019-08-06From the disability rights advocate and creator of the #DisabledAndCute viral campaign, a thoughtful, inspiring, and charming collection of essays exploring what it means to be black and disabled in a mostly able-bodied white America. Keah Brown loves herself, but that hadn't always been the case. Born with cerebral palsy, her greatest desire used to be normalcy and refuge from the steady stream of self-hate society strengthened inside her. But after years of introspection and reaching out to others in her community, she has reclaimed herself and changed her perspective.
I Can′t Walk but I Can Crawl by ISBN: 9781412918725Publication Date: 2005-10-18'As well as being of interest to educators, Joan Ross's autobiography would be would be worth including as a text for pupils following citizenship curriculum in secondary schools' - SENCO Update Joan is an adult with cerebral palsy who grew up when compulsory education was not in place for all children. Her memories of her childhood before inclusion, her development as a teenager and her adult life are chronicled without sentiment and this book offers the reader an autobiography of someone who lives with a significant disability. The book is supported by SCOPE who have provided an introduction and informative commentary about cerebral palsy. The book is of general interest and offers information and inspiration to Scope members and those whose lives are touched by CP.
Mobility Impairments/ Wheelchair
Sitting Pretty by ISBN: 9780062936790Publication Date: 2020-08-25A memoir-in-essays from disability advocate and creator of the Instagram account @sitting_pretty Rebekah Taussig, processing a lifetime of memories to paint a beautiful, nuanced portrait of a body that looks and moves differently than most. Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Rebekah Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), inspirational (Helen Keller), or angelic (Forrest Gump). None of this felt right; and as she got older, she longed for more stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling.
Disability Visibility by ISBN: 9781984899422Publication Date: 2020-06-30A groundbreaking collection of first-person writing on the joys and challenges of the modern disability experience- Disability Visibility brings together the voices of activists, authors, lawyers, politicians, artists, and everyday people whose daily lives are, in the words of playwright Neil Marcus, "an art . . . an ingenious way to live." A Vintage Books Original. ONE OF THE PROGRESSIVE'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent-but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Now, just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people.
Partial or Completely Missing Limbs
Amputation in Literature and Film by ISBN: 9783030743765Publication Date: 2021-08-11Amputation in Literature and Film: Artificial Limbs, Prosthetic Relations, and the Semiotics of "Loss" explores the many ways in which literature and film have engaged with the subject of amputation. The scholars featured in this volume draw upon a wide variety of texts, both lesser-known and canonical, across historical periods and language traditions to interrogate the intersections of disability studies with social, political, cultural, and philosophical concerns.
How to Lose Everything by ISBN: 9781771622622Publication Date: 2021-03-09Christa Couture has come to know every corner of grief--its shifting blurry edges, its traps, its pulse of love at the centre and the bittersweet truth that sorrow is a powerful and wise emotion. From the amputation of her leg as a cure for bone cancer at a young age to her first child's single day of life, the heart transplant and subsequent death of her second child, the divorce born of grief and then the thyroidectomy that threatened her career as a professional musician, How to Lose Everything delves into the heart of loss. Couture bears witness to the shift in perspective that comes with loss, and how it can deepen compassion for others, expand understanding, inspire a letting go of little things and plant a deeper feeling for what matters.
Multiple Sclerosis
Love from a to Z by ISBN: 9781534442726Publication Date: 2019-04-30From William C. Morris Award Finalist S.K. Ali comes an unforgettable romance that is part The Sun Is Also a Star mixed with Anna and the French Kiss, following two Muslim teens who meet during a spring break trip. A marvel: something you find amazing. Even ordinary-amazing. Like potatoes--because they make French fries happen. Like the perfect fries Adam and his mom used to make together. An oddity: whatever gives you pause. Like the fact that there are hateful people in the world. Like Zayneb's teacher, who won't stop reminding the class how "bad" Muslims are. But Zayneb, the only Muslim in class, isn't bad. She's angry. When she gets suspended for confronting her teacher, and he begins investigating her activist friends, Zayneb heads to her aunt's house in Doha, Qatar, for an early start to spring break. Fueled by the guilt of getting her friends in trouble, she resolves to try out a newer, "nicer" version of herself in a place where no one knows her. Then her path crosses with Adam's. Since he got diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in November, Adam's stopped going to classes, intent, instead, on perfecting the making of things. Intent on keeping the memory of his mom alive for his little sister. Adam's also intent on keeping his diagnosis a secret from his grieving father. Alone, Adam and Zayneb are playing roles for others, keeping their real thoughts locked away in their journals.
Muscular Dystrophy
Laughing at My Nightmare by ISBN: 9781626720077Publication Date: 2014-10-14With acerbic wit and a hilarious voice, Shane Burcaw's Laughing at My Nightmare describes the challenges he faces as a twenty-one-year-old with spinal muscular atrophy. From awkward handshakes to having a girlfriend and everything in between, Shane handles his situation with humor and a "you-only-live-once" perspective on life. While he does talk about everyday issues that are relatable to teens, he also offers an eye-opening perspective on what it is like to have a life threatening disease.
