Disability vs. Inability

By Jaxson

  • Disability

    According to many definitions, a disability or functional impairment is an impairment that may be cognitive, developmental, intellectual, mental, physical, sensory, or some combination of these. Other definitions describe disability as the societal disadvantage arising from such impairments. Disability substantially affects a person’s life activities and may be present from birth or occur during a person’s lifetime.

    Disabilities is an umbrella term, covering impairments, activity limitations, and participation restrictions. An impairment is a problem in body function or structure; an activity limitation is a difficulty encountered by an individual in executing a task or action; while a participation restriction is a problem experienced by an individual in involvement in life situations. Disability is thus not just a health problem. It is a complex phenomenon, reflecting the interaction between features of a person’s body and features of the society in which he or she lives.

    Disability is a contested concept, with different meanings in different communities. The term disability may be used to refer to physical or mental attributes that some institutions, particularly medicine, view as needing to be fixed (the medical model); it may also refer to limitations imposed on people by the constraints of an ableist society (the social model); or the term may serve to refer to the identity of disabled people. Physiological functional capacity (PFC) is a measure of an individual’s performance level that gauges one’s ability to perform the physical tasks of daily life and the ease with which these tasks are performed. PFC declines with advancing age to result in frailty, cognitive disorders, or physical disorders, all of which may lead to labeling individuals as disabled.

Wikipedia
  • Disability (noun)

    State of being disabled; deprivation or want of ability; absence of competent physical, intellectual, or moral power, means, fitness, and the like.

  • Disability (noun)

    A mental condition causing a difficulty with an intellectual task.

  • Disability (noun)

    Want of legal qualification to do a thing; legal incapacity or incompetency.

  • Disability (noun)

    Regular payments received by a disabled person, usually from the state

    “I had to go on disability after the accident.”

    “Did you get your disability this month?”

  • Inability (noun)

    Lack of the ability to do something; incapability.

  • Inability (noun)

    Lack of the option to do something; powerlessness.

Wiktionary
  • Inability (noun)

    the state of being unable to do something

    “his inability to accept new ideas”

Oxford Dictionary

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