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.