Chapter 13: Neither Victim nor Superhero: Reflections on Disability and Mental Health Counseling

This chapter highlights the complexity of the lived experience of disability through a personal narrative about navigating multiple, often conflicting, identities.

After briefly summarizing the understandings of scholars who maintain that narratives are the primary way in which people establish the identities of self and others, I focus on my story. Although an individual with a disability, scenes from my life demonstrate how I am neither the victim nor the superhero character so common in socially circulating stories about people who are disabled.

This chapter challenges understandings of disability as either a medical condition or a site of social oppression. It demonstrates how narrative analysis can be an important tool for disability scholars and activists, and points to ways in which stories about the complexity of the disability experience disability can be used as tools for resistance and social change.