The medical model positions a disability as something that must be diagnosed and addressed with medical intervention. It views disabilities as something that reduces a person’s quality of life, curing the disability as the ultimate goal. Also, the medical model promotes the image of people with disabilities as needing health care or as “sick”. Many people with the philosophy of the medical model underestimate the human capacity to learn about the complexities of the human body, and thus to make safe decisions about one’s disability.

Medical Model of Disability

The social model positions society as the disabling agent, rather than an individual’s impairment. Under the social model, an impairment is not automatically a disability. It is only a disability when society is not structured (physically, socially, or culturally) to include that impairment/variation. For example, in a society where glasses/corrective lenses are accessible and socially accepted, the impairment of having blurry vision without them is not necessarily disabling. The social model seeks to make changes in society, rather than focusing on disabled people to change.

Social Model of Disability

- Medical Model of Disability
- Social Model of Disability

State University of New York at Binghamton

From disability studies and social science perspectives, clinical psychology often adopts a medicalizing framework—equating disability with individual impairment and treating it as a deviation to be fixed. It focuses on the analytically isolated individual, favoring individual therapy over broader systemic approaches. The discipline’s narrow view of "systemic" care usually excludes societal and relational dynamics. Clinical psychology has historically overlooked the impact of social prejudice on disabled people’s mental health, often framing distress as a natural outcome of impairment. Disability studies critiques this as pathologizing, individualizing, and exclusionary, arguing that the true sources of distress are societal barriers and discrimination.

Critiques of Clinical Psychology

Simpson, Jane, and Carol Thomas. Clinical Psychology and Disability Studies: Bridging the Disciplinary Divide on Mental Health and Disability. Disability & Rehabilitation, 2014. doi:10.3109/09638288.2014.961656.

Reference For: Clinical Psychology and Disability Studies: Bridging the Disciplinary Divide on Mental Health and Disability

- Formulations
- Social influence on human behavior
- Legislation changes in clinical psychology
- Incorporating the social model of disability into psychological practice

Learn Before

Related

Learn After