Disability and Discrimination

Disability and Discrimination

Disabilities and discrimination seem to go hand in hand. If someone looks a little different because of their disability, they tend to be prejudged. Many people with Down Syndrome are called "retards" because the way they look. It doesn't mean that they aren't intelligent people. This writer is interested in the subject because her own child has Down Syndrome and one of her other children had Cystic Fibrosis. There needs to be a greater tolerance and less judgment against people who have disabilities. For the purpose of this paper, we will explore various forms of discrimination; create charts to help determine the number of people who discriminate based upon the disability and an overall poll of the number of people who feel there should be changes made.

Discrimination is everywhere. One cannot escape it. It seems that there is greater discrimination against people with physically visible disabilities than not. There is also discrimination against little understood disabilities such as mental illness. Discrimination can come in all forms-verbal, racial, cultural, sexual, physical, mental, and availability of programs aimed to help the disabled. In the labor field, there could be wage discrimination because of disabilities, including those one cannot see such as mental illness, and non-disabilities.

In both Canada and the United States, there are laws to protect people who have physically visible disabilities as well as individuals who have unseen disabilities such as mental illness. These laws are in place to prevent discrimination from individuals and the workplace. Accommodations must be made for the disabled, whether it is designated parking areas, lower tables in restaurants, areas in theaters, etc. In Canada, there is an Ontario Human Rights Commission and a Human Rights Tribunal which is ordered to investigate accusations of discriminatory treatment and tear down the obstacles holding disabled individuals from equal opportunities. Unfortunately, individuals suffering from mental illness are regularly denied housing, rejected from social gathering places such as restaurants and entertainment venues, and pressed into acclimating to workplace rules that may seem unreasonable to them, aggravating their illness. According to the Human Rights Tribunal in Canada, they have received complaints about discrimination due to disability numbering approximately 1,800, (Goar, 2011).

It is difficult to tell if someone has a mental illness unless they are physically displaying the symptoms such as shouting at nobody in particular, talking to people who are not there, etc., thus making it a hidden disability. There is greater understanding when individuals are visibly disabled, though there is not necessarily less discrimination. However, many people have intolerance for individuals with mental illness because they do not understand or have very little knowledge about mental health disabilities. Even more so than individuals with visible disabilities, people with mental health disabilities are accommodated grudgingly or not at all. With the state of the world today, there seems to be more diagnoses of some form of mental illness, which can be anything from depression (the most common) or a derivative of psychosis.

Data from a 1994-1995 Canadian study called The National Health Interview Survey - Disability Supplement (NHIS-D) was gathered to measure the amount of discrimination in the labor field. "The NHIS-D was administered in two phases. The primary screening question asked individuals whether they were currently "unable or limited in ability to participate in a major activity, including work and household responsibilities." Each respondent who answered yes was asked to identify up to two contributory conditions, which were subsequently coded by using ICD-9 criteria," (Goar, 2011).

"Econometric estimates of stigma were computed by using multivariate ordinary least squares regressions with the natural log of the hourly wage rate of each worker as the dependent variable and mental illness status as the primary independent variable, controlling for worker productivity and other worker characteristics. Separate models were run for each diagnosis (mood, psychotic, and anxiety disorders and all mental health disorders) for each stigma-reporting group, with workers without mental illness used as the reference. The coefficient of the mental illness variable in each wage model represents the effect of stigma against workers with mental illness. Taking the exponential of this coefficient, the transformed coefficient can be interpreted as the ratio of mean productivity-adjusted wages for workers with serious mental illness relative to workers with no mental illness. We hypothesized that the productivity-adjusted wage ratios would be significantly smaller (that is, lower mean adjusted wages) for workers who reported stigmatizing experiences compared with those who did not.

"Table 2 presents ratios of mean wages (observed wage ratios) for workers with mental illness (both those who reported and those who did not report stigmatizing experiences in the workplace) relative to those with no mental illness. Among workers with serious mental illness, those who did not report experiencing stigma had an observed wage ratio of 85 percent and those who reported experiencing stigma had a ratio of 72 percent. Similarly, among workers with mood disorders, the observed wage ratio was 84 percent for those who did not report experiencing stigma and 73 percent for those who did. Among workers with anxiety disorders, the wage ratios are 81 percent for those who did not report experiencing stigma and 66 percent for those who did. The lowest wage ratios, by far, were observed for workers with psychotic disorders: 76 percent for those who did not report experiencing stigma and 46 percent for those who did.

Table 2 - Observed and productivity-adjusted wage ratios of workers, by self-reports of whether stigma was experienced at work

Hourly wage (dollars)

Variable N Mean SD Observed wage ratio (%) Productivity-adjusted wage ratio (%) a P (for the adjusted ratio)

No mental illness and did not experience stigma 66,341 12.70 .07 Reference Reference Reference

All serious mental illness

Did not experience stigma 917 10.82 .31 85 111 .81

Experienced stigma 222 9.15 .58 72 69 .02

Mood disorders

Did not experience stigma 727 10.67 .38 84 102 .62