Please undo the synonymisation of the tag disability with health-issues

Question

The tag disability is currently synonymised with health-issues (see the full list of synonyms for health-issues). Based on the list of tag synonyms, this synonym was created on 22 June 2019, so it doesn't look like this was a direct consequence of What to do with the mental-health tag from June 2015.

Both the tag synonymisation and some of the proposals in the June 2015 question appear to be based on a model of disability that treats disability as (1) primarily a medical issue and (2) a problem that belongs to the individual. In my area of work—digital accessibility—and in disability studies this is known as the medical model of disability. Based on the medical model, disability requires a "cure" or, if that is not feasible, adjustment or behavioural change in the individual as a surrogate "cure".

This model is now outdated and has been replaced with the social model of disability, which does not deny the impact of the impairment but does not seek to change the person either. According to the social model, "disability" refers "to the restrictions caused by society when it does not give equivalent attention and accommodation to the needs of individuals with impairments" (Wikipedia), to " the result of the interaction between people living with impairments and an environment filled with physical, attitudinal, communication and social barriers" (People with Disability Australia) or to "a socially created problem and a matter of the full integration of individuals into society" (Disabled World). (The medical and the social models are by no means the two only models of disability, but I hope that we can handle this tagging question without additional disability theory.)

What I am asking by requesting to undo the synonymisation between disability and health-issues is for Academia SE to leave behind the outdated medical model of disability. (I do not wish to imply that Academia SE defends or promotes the medical model, only that is seems to be implicit in these tag synonyms.)

This would mean that, for example, the following questions would no longer be tagged health-issues but disability:

• How do conferences work for deaf scientists?
• Teaching visual tools for visually impaired students?
• Does the Americans With Disabilities Act require accommodations for students whose disability prevents them from behaving ethically? (currently closed)
• How should I apply for readmission to a graduate program from which I had to withdraw due to misconduct caused by a disability?
• (probably) Trying to volunteer as a research assistant post-Master's and not having any success so far (currently closed)
• Oral Defense for Hearing Impaired Student

(This list is not intended to be exhaustive. There are a number of questions that are still tagged disability even though they were submitted after 22 June 2019, e.g. Does FERPA require parental notification of disability assessment? .)

Desynonymising disability is not a perfect solution. Strictly speaking, some of the above question would be more appropriately tagged accessibility, but that tag does not exist on this site and creating it might be harder to achieve here.

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Update 05.09.2020: On second thought, inclusion or disability-inclusion (the latter is a term used by the CDC in the USA) may be a better tag than accessibility. It would definitely work well for questions such as How do conferences work for deaf scientists?, Teaching visual tools for visually impaired students? and Oral Defense for Hearing Impaired Student.

Answer 1

While I do see the problem here, I think that having two separate tags does not really solve it while creating more problems:

• By the nature of our site, we almost exclusively focus on the social aspect anyway. For the questions we get, it mostly does not matter whether something is a disability or a health issue (wherever one draws the line between the two). To give a somewhat unrealistic, but illustrative example, whether somebody cannot access a lecture hall because of a broken leg or a permanent paralysis hardly affects our approach to the problem. Indeed, sometimes the answer to a question is that some health issue qualifies as a disability and thus grants certain rights.

• The line between a permanent disability and temporary health issue is indisputably blurry, or one might say that one thing can be a disability or a health issue depending whether you view it from a social or medical point of view (which is not so different from your outline).

• Again by the nature of our site, most questions in health-issues are about disabilities or something that may be one. In fact, in a brief search I couldn’t even find a single question which I would consider correctly tagged health-issues, but which was clearly not about disabilities.

As a consequence, I expect that splitting the tag as proposed would lead to users being confused as to which tag they should use and users not finding existing questions that help them. If we ignore everything related to the name of the tag for a second, what do we gain from splitting?

Instead, I suggest that we think about a better name for the main tag (i.e., the synonym target). This is obviously not an easy choice as one has to consider amongst others:

• Some choices may cause people refraining from using the tag altogether due to social stigma, e.g., disabilities.

• Some choices may cause the undesirable associations you describe, e.g., health-issues. (Though I am somewhat surprised by that since at least to me health issue does not imply that something requires cure or similar – not that I dispute that others have this association.)

Here, I would like to play the ball back to you, the expert. But even if there should be no good and concise name for this, I would refrain from splitting the tag. In that case, I would consider even a super-clunky name like accomodating-and-handling-health-issues-and-disabilities the lesser evil.

Answer 2

To have some data to help deciding, I went through a bunch of questions in the current that heath-issues. I excluded only closed questions. I categorised the questions along three axes:

• Mental (depression, ADHD, etc.) vs. physical (broken leg, cancer, blindness, etc.):

  • 28 questions were about mental issues.
  • 6 questions were about physical issues.
  • 4 questions did not specify anything.

  I want to mention that I think the distinction does not affect the answer for many of these questions, even when accounting for the stigma of mental issues. (Though I did not do a statistics on that.)

• Disabilities and chronic diseases vs. short-term issues. I went for the former when in doubt, which mostly applied to mental-health issues.

  • 28 questions were about disabilities or chronic diseases.
  • 3 questions were clearly not about disabilities.
  • 5 questions were about preventing health problems, mostly psychohygiene.
  • For 2 questions it was completely unclear.

• Accommodation and handling bad performances vs. other issues.

  • 21 questions were about accommodation and handling bad performance.
  • 12 questions were clearly about something else (including the 5 questions about preventing health problems).
  • 5 questions were not clear about this on account of broadness (“How do you handle …?”).

Answer 3

Since Azor Ahai -- he him suggested that I should post an alternative tag as an answer, here is a suggestion: introduce the tag disability-inclusion for (suggested tag wiki excerpt)

Questions about the inclusion of people with disabilities in higher education. These questions can cover both social practices and technological challenges, and can apply to either students or teaching staff.

This should be broad enough to cover all the examples listed in my question above.