Have you ever felt excluded? — Scope | Disability forum
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Have you ever felt excluded?

Chloe_Scope
Chloe_Scope Posts: 10,586 Disability Gamechanger
Scope have released a brand new campaign!

Half of disabled people feel excluded from society and many say prejudicial attitudes haven't improved in decades. With research finding that two in five disabled people feel undervalued and disconnected from society, something had to be done.


Living with a disability can be incredibly difficult at times, but we would love to hear your experiences. Have you ever felt excluded from society? 

By sharing every day experiences we hope to highlight areas where people feel undervalued and disconnected from society, but also what changes you believe need to be made. 

Scope are focusing on five key aspects and want to promote disabled people living the life they choose. By sharing your story it will others to see they are not alone.

These areas include:
  • Attitudes
  • Work
  • Public transport
  • The right care and support
  • Access to digital technology. 
There's something everyone can do to be a Disability Gamechanger so join us today to end this inequality.

Have you experienced any inequality around the five key aspects? What changes would you like to see to society?

Let us know in the comments below! 
Scope

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Comments

  • Pin
    Pin Community member Posts: 139 Pioneering
    Oh goodness yes. Even somewhere as simple as a hospital - everything is verbal. I’m 30, have a hearing impairment and still need to take someone to appointments because I never hear my name being called. Last time someone else went into my appointment because they misheard And I didn’t realise it was my name ??‍♀️
    Is it so difficult to have a screen in hospitals like at a GPs office?
  • leeCal
    leeCal Community member Posts: 7,550 Disability Gamechanger
    Hey! This thread is entitled “have you ever felt excluded?” I posted “prayer is free” and it disappeared marked as spam! Since when is suggesting saying a prayer spam? And so I’m excluded! 

    “This is my simple religion. No need for temples. No need for complicated philosophy. Your own mind, your own heart is the temple. Your philosophy is simple kindness.” 
    ― Dalai Lama XIV

  • [Deleted User]
    [Deleted User] Posts: 19 Connected
    The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • susan48
    susan48 Community member Posts: 2,221 Disability Gamechanger
    I’m sure most of us on this site has felt excluded. It’s usually a daily occurrence sadly.
    Theres lots of reasons as to why.
    I feel excluded but my anxiety makes me exclude myself from daily life, if that makes sense.

    @leeCal, not sure why your prayer posts disappeared but if praying helps you then I’m glad. 



  • Liam_Alumni
    Liam_Alumni Scope alumni Posts: 1,101 Pioneering
    Hi @leeCal,

    I'm sorry to hear that your posts have been marked as spam. I've looked into this for you and this should now be resolved. :) Sorry about that!
    Liam
  • Chloe_Scope
    Chloe_Scope Posts: 10,586 Disability Gamechanger
    Thank you for this @newborn! It too is important to be positive and look at the alternative. The phasing of this question is in line with the new Scope research :)
    Scope

  • newborn
    newborn Community member Posts: 832 Pioneering
    edited August 2018
    When DDA came in, it was the most beautiful piece of legislation in u.k. history. Every word had been thought over and fought for, for decades.

    Sadly, the  chattering classes  had/have attention span for only one idea at a time, and in those days, they were still belatedly considering themselves trendy original thinkers if they heroically stated they agreed with the 100% in u.k.  who opposed race segregation in South Africa or southern u.s.a.

    They could grasp that a fellow man (not woman) might be treated as an equal man  in law, even with a different skin colour.    Many M.P's were gay, so they could even, gradually,  be brought to concede that homosexuals, too, might be considered equal.     

    Women, Disabled or Older People, might vaguely be assumed to be slightly similar to real, ( M.P.) humans, just as long as merely making empty statements that such people are equal won't make any difference to any M.Ps, their behaviour, their friends, or their wealth .   

     In other words, it was exactly like making meaningless proclamations about Southern U.S.A, or South Africa, from the unaffected safety of their own cosy Palaces in Westminster.

    There is one equality, and it's name is Racism.  Racism, alone, is enforced by authority, with criminal proceedings.

    Ageism and Disablism will be encountered daily.  The victim is required to become wealthier than the offending organisations, including government, in order to fund personal pursuit of every daily breach,  through every stage of court and appeal. 

    Are premises, including shops and new housing,  and stations, inaccessible, through steps and through wrongly adjusted door closers? Is planning consent for  disabled/elderly hostile built environment still given, , all these years after the DDA?  Alone, the individual must make every instance the centre of a personalised complaint, then sue the government, the council, half the shops, services and organisations in the country..

    Is unecessary background noise, especially musac,  poured over every BBC programme,  especially any nature film?   Does imposed avoidable noise make normal shopping and cafes intolerable to those with hearing loss, ptsd,  autism and other conditions?  Every individual is required to pursue legal enforcement, all alone, unfunded and unaided and without support or advice.

    While old people are routinely described as 'a burden' ,depicted as rich, selfish, home-hogging bed blockers, is u.k. state pension the world's worst, and far below the minimum to sustain life? Are old people stereotyped and mocked e.g. in Mrs Browns boys, , or One Man Two Guvnors? 

    Are public and charitable services such as counselling available only to those who can journey to a particular building, instead of on the phone?  Do medical providers use all available car parking for their own staff, not for disabled excluded potential  service users? 

     Is it reasonable  and proportionate that such a state of universal disablist/ageist practice is regarded as trivial by comparison to a perceived racial slur?

    Sir Trevor Phillips, when Chair of Equalities,  pointed out that "Disablism is invisible , universally practiced, socially accepted, and institutionalised, and, in its effect on peoples lives,  is,  in many ways,  worse  than racism. "     

     He could have said the same about Ageism, which is all of the above, plus, virtually, being encouraged as government policy and  favourite  fashionable habit of the chattering classes .

    Andy Rickell of Scope wrote that disability  organisations made a mistake by splintering, and a bigger mistake by not aligning with older people, because the overlap of interests is so great, and the numbers among the voting population  are overwhelming.     

    Scope trying to attract attention to a few aspects is not as good as united lobbying for a  Ministry of Elders,   Disability, and Equalities,   with a prime purpose of making all Equalities Equal.     Therefore, if a person can expect the police to attend to an incident when someone uses a racist insult, s/he should equally expect it to be a police matter when s/he is badly treated, unable to access goods or public or private services, segregated into 'care' ghettos,  or social 'apartheid'  . 

    A legal 'remedy' which is blatantly  impossible for the Discrimination  victim to exercise, is no remedy at all, thus in breach of national and international human rights law.     

  • newborn
    newborn Community member Posts: 832 Pioneering
    @Debbie do is  entirely  typical, yet the beaurocratic tick box designers think she does not, or should not, exist.  They have neat conveyor belts to process a range of correctly conforming stereotypes.   

    Power is heady. Power is invariably liable to be abused, normally with self righteous victim blaming by the power abusers.   Those in power to control funds and services can only be human, therefore can only reassure one another  they have a perfectly good system.  It is 'their' system, so it must be right. 

      If inconvenient beggars for help go and fall off the  conveyor belts, those  beggars are themselves to blame.   If supplicants don't grovel gratefully, they deserve refusal.  If they cannot fit any of the rectangular tick boxes, they are wilfully, deliberately, failing their obligation to comply, and must be harshly punished.

    @Debbie finds it unreasonably difficult or impossible to access services due to unlawful failure of service providers to adapt to meet the needs of excluded service users or potential service users.  Agraphobics,  claustrophobics, and many other disabled groups are directly discriminated  against.   Other older and disabled people are indirectly discriminated against because  their carers are untreated, due to not being able to leave them .

    Recent radio 4 journalists, investigating Charity,  have described how Advocacy service charities are swallowed by what are, in effect, quangos.  Syphoning all available funding, the quangos become the undercutting contract winners, ostensibly providing the bare minimum statutory obligation 'services'. They comply with whatever the paymaster authority demands.  Instead of helping, often with experienced volunteers, they tick boxes restricted to what the L.A. wishes.  If the social service team chooses to refuse help to those who don't beg pleasingly, and don't fit neatly on the limited number of conveyor belts, then they are excluded from help, or hope. 
  • newborn
    newborn Community member Posts: 832 Pioneering
    @pin and @,ami both described  being unlawfully  discriminated against, one in services, one in employment, by reason of disablist practices.    If the same thing happened because of racist discrimination,   prosecution  action would have been taken by authorities.

    Incidentally,  the t.v. programme 'impossible  engineering' has invented the wheel, for people  being left out due to hearing loss.   

    But,  foreign language translation is considered  to merit priority funding, out of sheer terror of the word 'racist'   (only in u.k., not in other countries including e.u.)   

    Meanwhile,  nobody fears the word 'disablist', because the law is officially unenforced.  Therefore, who could be bothered even to publicise the two, cheap, smartphone apps. ?   One is to make deaf people safe from traffic, by translating sound to a vibration warning.  The other is to end exclusion by providing instant translation of conversation into text, so everyone in a group can be equal.
  • debbiedo49
    debbiedo49 Community member Posts: 2,904 Disability Gamechanger
    @newborn I saw that TV series it is epic!
  • Topkitten
    Topkitten Community member Posts: 1,285 Pioneering
    I began to get ill at the age of 49 and have noticed increasing exclusion as my age has risen and my condition been diagnosed as chronic. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I was included.

    I used to be a husband and father, played sports and organised teams at different places, such as pubs, and was always right in the middle of things. Up until recently I was going out with other healthy people but few would chat much with me, I guess they thought it might be catching. Now I cannot go out at all and feel so much worse.

    The systems in place are supposed to provide help but again I am excluded because I am considered a troublemaker because I don't accept poor support without creating a fuss. Thanks to Mental Health, Orthopaedics, Social Care and GP surgeries I am now alone and sat if front of the TV 24/7 and my only visitor is a cleaner that I pay to come round. Even my family now excludes me from what they do and have done so for 3 years or so, despite my having some mobility until the last few months.

    It is disgusting that we get treated so badly (when we get help at all) and are left to sort out everything for ourselves.

    TK
    "I'm on the wrong side of heaven and the righteous side of hell" - from Wrong side of heaven by Five Finger Death Punch.
  • axwy62
    axwy62 Community member Posts: 142 Pioneering
    Once upon a time things were improving. After the DDA, suddenly everyone was thinking about how people in wheelchairs could get into their buildings and 'hearing loop' available signs appeared all over the place etc etc. Things were by no means perfect and a lot of disabilities were still ignored, but we were at least starting to move in the right direction. 
    Then along came the big banking crisis and all of a sudden every phrase uttered by politicians and headlined in the press which mentioned 'disabled' or 'chronic illness' also included the phrase 'benefit scrounger'. Link the two often enough and you end up with the situation we're in now.
    Even sympathetic members of the public believe that all disabled people claim benefits and at least 20% of disability benefit claims are fraudulent, no one believes that a disabled person could possibly earn enough to buy their own car, many people in my (other wise very safe) area no longer display wheelchair stickers in their vehicle to avoid consequent vandalism, I've been abused as a scrounger for claiming free prescriptions (which I get because of a health condition, not because I'm on benefits) and I've been told that someone who can walk from the rear of the car to the passenger seat obviously only uses a wheelchair because they're lazy.
    Even the people who are supposed to help are no different. My previous GP is the direct cause of some of the damage to my spine since he repeatedly told me there was nothing wrong with my back and it was all in my head. When my husband paid for me to be seen privately, it turned out I had three fractures, one of which had damaged the nerves going to my right leg so badly that I have never been pain free since. I've been passed between various hospital departments all my life because I have a list of issues as long as your arm to the point where I was asking if the latest health professional wanted highlights or the full top to toe, and as soon as the list went beyond 3 or 4 problems you could see the disbelief in their faces. It's taken 56 years, but I've finally been diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos, which explains every single one of those problems. It's of no comfort to know I was right all along.
    For anyone who is just reading the first and last paragraphs, I can summarise by saying I'm sick to death of being treated like a second class citizen by the majority - I have to say, including some disabled people, and having to fight over everything from access to trains, planes and ferries to being able to use the self-checkout in the supermarket, so do I feel excluded? I can't remember what being included feels like.
  • TimMusgrave
    TimMusgrave Community member Posts: 15 Connected
    susan48 said:
    I feel excluded but my anxiety makes me exclude myself from daily life, if that makes sense.
    @susan48 - it totally makes sense. I'm sure many of us are aware that we can exclude ourselves.
  • feir
    feir Community member Posts: 397 Pioneering
    I'd been housebound for over a year, the ultimate in exclusion from society.

    I'm reliant on taxis to go anywhere, including short distances i could walk to. My bf has a car but this also means reliance on him as well and he lives an hour away so it's not feasible that i can rely on him (although eventually we're gonna have to live together or at least nearer each other).
  • Tracey1968
    Tracey1968 Community member Posts: 2 Connected
    I am quite newly disabled and have experienced exclusion most days since. I'm a pretty strong character so can deal with most of it head on. The worst culprits are the disability services! If you don't fit the box then they don't want to know or help. I didn't want a mobility car, as I had recently bought an appropriate car, yet they wouldn't support me buying or hiring a rooftop hoist for my wheelchair. The conclusion was to find £4.2k. nice 1 lol

Brightness