Historical and Social Constructions of Disability

Across time, societal perspectives and every day and institutional practices surrounding disabled people has varied. Indeed, the oldest historical documents contain references to physical impairments and behaviours that many people today would classify as a ‘disability’ or ‘disorder’ (Braddock & Parish, 2001). In A History of Disability, French theorist Henri-Jacques Stiker (1999) wrote of the “fear of the abnormal” and how disability has been with us across time. It is, as he noted, trans-historically disturbing, making visible that “an aberrancy within the corporeal order is an aberrancy within the social order” (p. 40). Notably, long before autism came be a clinical category, there were a multitude of histories, discourses and practices that ultimately shaped its making (Nadesan, 2005). Importantly, then, to better understand how autism has come to be understood clinically (as discussed in Chap. 3), as well as from a more socially and discursively oriented way (as discussed in Chap. 4), it is important to gain an understanding of disability, and more particularly mental health and mental illness (that is, mental health conditions), across time. For as Nadesan (2005) noted, there is a complex web of histories, discourses, and everyday practices that have facilitated the production of autism.