Abstract
Employing some of the features of participatory research methodology, a disabled faculty joins a student with mental health diagnosis to examine the factors that hinder or enable success for this group. The theoretical framework or scholarly bearings for the study comes from the critical social model of disability, disability services scholarship in the United States, and education theory literature on “student success”. With a particular focus on students with bipolar disorder, the article highlights the gaps in disability scholarship on this specific group while underscoring the oppression experienced by them through the inclusion of an autoethnographic segment by the primary author in this collaborative, scholarly work. The model of access, we propose, moves beyond accommodations—which are often retrofits or after the thought arrangements made by an institution—and asks for environmental support, social and institutional inclusion, and consideration for students with psychiatric health diagnosis. This article not only presents an array of problems in the United States academy but also a set of recommendations for solving these problems. Going beyond the regime of retrofit accommodations, we ask for an overhaul of institutional policies, infrastructures, and curricula so that the academy is inclusive of neurodiverse bodies and appreciates their difference.
Highlights
An OverviewThis article examines the needs of students with mental health diagnosis in post-secondary education through the scope of bipolar disorder and suggests changes that may promote an accessible pedagogy and assist in the inclusion of students with mental disabilities in the academy
We find the reasoning of the critical social model, meaningful for several reasons in the context of mental disability in the academy
A student with a mental disability may be suffering in all aspects of life on one day: her bipolar disorder might prevent her from attending class, participating in online group projects, or leaving her home to go to work, and this student may never experience violent thoughts in her life
Summary
This article examines the needs of students with mental health diagnosis in post-secondary education through the scope of bipolar disorder and suggests changes that may promote an accessible pedagogy and assist in the inclusion of students with mental disabilities in the academy. Social Inclusion, 2018, Volume 6, Issue 4, Pages 194–206 ticle advances several of the goals of this special issue by addressing mental disability, such as: 1) a student and an instructor taking the slogan, “nothing about us without us”, to heart by co-authoring a participatory research article to explicate the experiences of students with mental disabilities; 2) critique how faculty and staff in higher education view performance of students with and without disabilities from their privileged spaces and cultivate an unfriendly academic climate of ableism; and 3) expand the methodological toolkit within qualitative research by employing in an intersectional manner methods from Disability Studies including, a disability narrative, personal reflections, and the use of medical and critical social models of disability to frame this discussion that collectively make connections between lived experiences of disabled students and how they are restricted by social and physical structures, institutional policies, and ableist norms
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