Doctor Clare

The portrayal of disability in media has long been an interest of mine. I think it started with my first job in the field, supporting adults completing residential treatment. When you know and work with people with disabilities in your everyday life, you realize the common media portrayals of special needs, mental illness, learning disabilities and other similar designations are often fully fiction.

In my work teaching, I have had the opportunity to support students to both consume and critique media portraying individuals with disabilities. In the last five or so years, I added an assignment to the special education survey class I taught, wherein students were instructed to view a piece of media (TV show or movie) featuring a character with a disability, then construct a critique. This critique was meant to provide a description of how the character is portrayed to the audience, an analysis on how the other characters in the piece of media interact with and treat the character with the disability, and a critique of how this squares with what is actually known about people with disabilities according to real-life reports and research.

I found, semester after semester and year after year, students seemed to be turning to the same few pieces of media. Rain Main was surely influential writ large, and also bucked the prevailing sentiments of its time by portraying the person with a disability as multi-faceted and even gifted in many way, but it also perpetuated a multitude of stereotypes, and at some points even uses the person with the disability as a device to move along the plot of the real protagonist, his neurotypical brother.

The first concepts of The View Disabled were starting to take shape. I envisioned a resource, online, accessible, that catalogued, organized and promoted media featuring individuals with disabilities. Searches online–Google, Reddit–as well as requests from students showed that an interest for such a resource was there. Important components to consider include the accuracy of the portrayal of the person with disabilities (and whether a disabled actor, if fictional, was hired to portray them), as well as impact of the media (was it widely known?), and quality (was it well done? Fun to watch?) I wanted to center the voices of people with disabilities. I knew there had to be people already writing on this subject, but work needed to be done to pull resources together.

While that work of pulling together resources into a searchable database is ongoing, below are a variety of resources I have already identified in furtherance of this project. As a note, since my own work and focus is on school-aged children with disabilities (an even smaller subset of an already small market), I have organized my resources around the categories of IDEA, the federal special education legislation.

General Support for Such a Project

Autism

  • Atypical
  • Extraordinary Attorney Woo
  • The Good Doctor
  • Love on the Spectrum

Emotional Disturbance

Intellectual Disabilities

Learning Disabilities

  • Like Stars on Earth

Modality Deficits (Hearing, Vision, Speech)

  • Deaf U

Orthopedic Impairments/Physical Disabilities

Other:

Classics. Here is the repository for some of those old (20+ Year Old) contributions to media. They paved the way, in many ways, but are not indicative of modern media.

  • Rain Man
  • I Am Sam
  • Life Goes On