The Starting Point: psycho-social Well-being of Persons with Disabilities

     It is just recently when the relationship between gender and disability started being integrated in the rehabilitation of disability. But on the other hand, little is being done. When women with disabilities face challenges of gender related issues, they are thrown back and forth between the disability movement and the gender authorities. The gender authorities will often look at them as disabled and the disability movement will look at them as women, this leaves them on a cross road not knowing where to go in order to get their issues addressed.

     Women with disabilities face a double stigma of being female and having disability. As women or rather female, they are at a higher risk of psycho-social challenges as compared to men with disabilities or even women without disabilities. In the feminist field, women with disabilities will report higher cases of depression and stress as compared to women without disabilities. There is a lot of evidence that the disability movement is a male movement by default, and this has had a lot of misdiagnosis of how to approach psycho-social challenges of women with disabilities because most research is done on men with disabilities and the findings are used to treat women with disabilities. In some cases, the research is done on women in the general population without putting into consideration that women with disabilities face some exclusive challenges that are way beyond what women in the general population go through.

     Women with disabilities make up one large and most disadvantaged population in most countries around the world. Their number is too big to be ignored and also too unique in some ways to be handled by the findings of a research from the general female population.

In order to come up with a reliable solution to the psycho-social challenges facing women with disabilities, there is need to do a gendered based research and even go further and make it strictly for women with disabilities. in the society today, we find that researchers, scholars and interventionists are not are not well informed about the unique  aspects of psycho-social health of persons with disabilities in general and women with disabilities specifically.

     It is now time for the disability rehabilitation officials to start taking into consideration the maleness and femaleness of disability in relation to psycho-social well-being. By doing this, there will be a straight way of applying the right rehabilitation aspect to the right gender.