In the cases of the Vacaville article and Crockett's Letters to the Editor we can see curative violence being enacted through forced medication without regard to how future medication may impact an inmate's ability to stand trial.

 Psychiatric Industrial Complex and Curative Violence

Curative Violence was a term coined by Eunjung Kim to describe the physical and material violence inflicted against disabled people that is justified as a cure. Kim uses the term cure to mean any attempt to lessen or eliminate illness or disability. Curative violence is meant to give voice to the fact that society's ableist obsessions with curing disabled and chronically ill folk can result in further disability, or even death.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

The Vacaville article notes how that the time an inmate spends in psychiatric care, even when that care is forced, is not counted to the length of their sentence. We see this same sentiment in Crockett's pieces. These accounts detail  what is often considered or termed as the psychiatric industrial complex.

Psychiatric and Carceral Systems

Intersectionality examines the experiences of people who are experiencing discrimination on the basis of two or more marginalized identities at the same time, and how this differs from experiencing discrimnination on the basis of these identities individually.  Because of this depending on context, we all have areas where we experience privilege, as well as areas of oppression

For example, the stereotypes or preconceived notions held about black women are not merely a combination of those held about black people and those held about women, but a unique intersection of racism and sexism that black women experience differently from either black men or white women.

Intersectionality

When AI systems are designed through the lens of the medical model, disability is framed primarily as an individual deficit to be diagnosed, measured, or corrected. This drives the development of technologies such as diagnostic algorithms, assistive apps, or predictive screening tools that focus on “fixing” impairments rather than addressing the broader structural barriers that create disablement. While such tools can provide clinical benefits, they risk reinforcing a narrow view of disability as pathology and sidelining questions of justice, accessibility, and agency.

How Medical Model Shapes AI

Shew notes that AI is often framed in media and research as a kind of “cure” for disability — for example, prosthetics that restore a “normal” body or AI tools that erase impairments. These narratives center technological intervention (and often making life "easier" for the caretaker rather than the person needing care) while sidelining social changes that would make the world more accessible. By treating disability as a condition to be corrected, such stories reinforce ableist ideas rather than valuing disabled people’s lived experiences.

Narratives of AI and "Cure"

Schalk, Sami. Black Disability Politics, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478027003

Black Disability Politics

Similar to the usage of the prison industrial complex as a term used to describe the privatization of prisons in the United States and how prisons get monetary benefit from people being incarcerated so they don't have a monetary incentive to actually decrease re-incarceration and have more of a monetary incentive to keep people in prison. The psychiatric industrial complex is a term used to describe how psychiatry creates a space that derives monetary benefit off of having being confined in psychiatric institutions or people continuously needing to access psychiatric care to get medication.

The Psychiatric Industrial Complex

Curative Violence

Because of intersectionality, people can simutaneously experience privaledge and oppression depending on the social groups we identify with. 

Reality of the Human Condition

Disability studies resaerch often neglects the presence of an individual's identity which can have major influence over their subjective reality and reinforces oppressive systems. 

Critical Perspective of Disability Studies

Evidence-based treatments can work for a disability but often fail to take into account the whole person's identity. 

For example, If we are treating a Black Male who has cancer or a Black female who with an opioid use disorder, then we have to take into account the different needs that may arise in treatment. Scholarly research should also focus on the unique experience of groups and NOT how they deviate from the social norms of dominant groups.

Taking into account each client's different aspects of their identity can help the practitioner understand how their experiences shape their behavior. 

Why Intersectionality Is Important For Healthcare

Through centering Black Disabled people the Black Panther also showed how they had been influenced by the writings of Black feminists such as Frances M. Beal's conception of "double jeopardy" by using terms like multi-disabilities and double whammy to show the intersections of racism and ableism for Black disabled people. 

The Black Panthers Centering of Intersectionality 

The NBWHP's work is intersectional in nature because it is centered on the intersection of race and gender. This is evident both with how the organization grew out of white feminist health activism as a specifically Black feminist health organization, but also in publications and internal documents that overwhelmingly name racism and sexism as categories of oppression with major impacts on Black women's health.

Intersectionality and the NBWHP

Crip futures must be intersectionally approached. Floyd and Abrams acknowledge that their accounts of academic ableism are shaped by their whiteness and that their whiteness shielded them from some of the harsher consequences of academic ableism. Their whiteness also allowed Floyd to be valued as a learner in the interdependent classroom discussed. Abes also recognizes her whiteness can limit how she works towards crip futures because racism encourages white faculty, even those engaged in creating crip futures to overlook the experiences of disabled students of color.

Crip Futures and Intersectionality

For faculty and graduate students who are immigrants, there is not just anxiety about how disability disclosure would impact their job but, also whether it could impact their ability to get a visa, or even get accommodations and disability services back in their home country, depending on whether they are diagnosed. Additionally, ambient uncertainty is compounded for scholars who are Black, Indigenous, or otherwise a person of colour, and scholars of marginalized genders as ambient uncertainty compounds with other microaggressions and previous harms of the academic system. 

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