Apart from the apparent physical barriers that most individuals on wheelchair would inadvertently experience in an attempt to carry on a normal life, the more pertinent matters which are often neglected by the public are those related to the individual’s heart and soul, or more formally, his/her psychological development. Often, this aspect of a wheelchair-bound person is very much taken care of by his family and caregivers since they are the ones who would come in frequent contact with their disabled family members. In this article, we would look at the different stages of life in which the individual becomes disabled/wheelchair-bound – childhood, adulthood and the golden years.
Childhood
For a child who is born disabled and wheelchair-bound, the parents would give more attention and shower him/her with more love, sometimes to the extent of neglecting their other children. In such a way, the disabled child would the living under the apparent idyllic environment, oblivious to society's opinion. Due to the extensive care expressed by his family, the child may end up being too pampered and eventually realise the attention that he/she can command, subtly using their disability as a pretext to demand for material gains. More often than never, the parents would be forced to give in.
However, unlike most able-bodied children who would be able to gradually break away from the protective shelter of their parents even as they progress into adolescence, children who are wheelchair-bound tend to have a permanent attachment to them due to the compulsive amount of care and nurturing deluged by the parents during early childhood. As such, most of these children would take a longer period of time to become independent and may experience a cultural shock as the change of environment gradually becomes more conspicuous and develops into a shocking realism of society, often one of bleakness and indifference.
Adulthood
Due to various factors such as accidents or occasionally a serious bout of sickness or injury might just make an able-bodied adult a hapless victim of disability and eventually become wheelchair-bound. The effects of these are rather undefined and results in different consequences for different classes of people.
Blue-Collared Job Workers
This comes with a debilitating blow to the blue-collared job workers whose works involve mainly operational and manual stuff. With their apparent disability and immobility, these individuals would most likely lose their jobs due to the inability to carry out such level of work. Other than the obvious financial blow faced by the disabled/wheelchair-bound blue-collared workers, the psychological issue of being helpless and incapable of doing anything would soon set in. Robbed of a job, the individual would start experiencing a sense of purposelessness and despair especially more so for a sole breadwinner with a family to sustain; juggling between footing medical-related bills and the imminent problem of feeding the family. Other issues pertinent to this would be further elucidated in the Socioeconomic section of the website.
White-Collared Job Workers
For this group of people, the after effects of being disabled/ wheelchair bound is not very severe given the substantially less physical demands for the job but rather focused more towards the intellectual and management aptitudes of the particular individual. In other words, as long as the individual is still able to utilize his/her relevant skills in the job, the person’s state of employment is still status quo. Consequentially, the organization/company would be galvanized to introduce new measures and facilities to accommodate for the individual, and hence indefinitely becoming conscious of the fact that physical disability should not be an impeding factor that could by any means prejudice one’s perspective of another.
Elderly Years
Most of the psychological problems that the elderly people face are often attributed to them having the mentality that they are a burden to their children and caregivers. This outlook is exacerberated since the movement of the elderly are slow and unsteady. Due to that, the elderly on wheechair would often segregate themselves in order to prevent inconvenience caused.
However for the more open and accepting elderly, they would not really be devastated by condition and still continue their normal lives, and to some extent with much more confidence and self dignity. This can be credited to their old age and apparent wisdom.