Why It’s So Important to Listen & Empathize With Our Clients

At the most basic level, a disability is a disruption. Those who develop a condition in their adulthood can suddenly find themselves struggling with everyday tasks, and are physically or mentally unable to do as much as they did when they were younger. It can be incredibly demoralizing to be forced to confront those limitations, and no one feels that more acutely than the person wading through a to-do list that never seems to get any smaller. Unfortunately, many bystanders are simply unwilling or unable to empathize with that struggle. They have no broader understanding...

Suffering from Agoraphobia, Long Term Disability Benefits Denied

Alice generally liked to keep to herself. She enjoyed her role as a data analyst and liked her co-workers well enough. She simply found larger social gatherings to be extraordinarily stressful, and usually tried to keep to a smaller circle of trusted friends and co-workers at her office in Regina.  For the most part, that seldom proved to be a problem. Alice had no trouble keeping up with her responsibilities at work, and her colleagues understood her anxiety and tried to respect her boundaries. Everything changed unexpectedly when Alice went through an unusually...

Workplace Allergies Not Supported by Long Term Disability

By the time he was 42, Connor had learned to appreciate his job as a warehouse worker in Hamilton. There weren’t many other jobs he could do with his lack of formal training, but he had managed to carve out a place for himself on the floor.   His world started to unravel when he developed a serious allergy to one of the cleaning chemicals used in the building. He was regularly breaking out in hives and often had trouble breathing, and the symptoms persisted after he started wearing work gloves and a mask. His doctor told him that allergies like this can begin at...

Post-Settlement – Life After Post-Concussion Syndrome

When Sara, 40, slipped on the ice last winter while skating with her family, she hit her head. She blacked out for a few seconds and woke up feeling dizzy and nauseated. Her family took her to the emergency department where they ran some tests and found out that she had a concussion. It didn’t seem too serious at first, so she pushed herself to get back to her normal routine almost immediately. Within a day she was getting violently ill at work, suffering splitting headaches, and often lost track of what she was saying mid-sentence. She had developed post-concussion...

Keeping Up With The Kardashians and Disability in Television

There’s a long history of problematic representation of persons with disabilities in film and television. From being portrayed as villainous or helpless (see Darth Vader and Tiny Tim) to being used as inspiration fodder or the butt of a joke (Forrest Gump), persons with disabilities have often been used as plot devices rather than being portrayed as human beings. However, despite this long-standing trend, things are changing.  Arguably one of the best television shows of all time, Breaking Bad, did wonders for representations of people with disabilities with the...

Why Are We Lonely and What Can We Do About It?

More than 37 million people are living in Canada, yet many Canadians have never felt more alone. The Angus Reid Institute and the Cardus think tank collaborated on a recent study that found that an astonishing 23 percent of the country experiences extreme loneliness and social isolation. That isolation correlates with many negative side effects that can have an impact on every area of a person’s life.   “Social isolation and loneliness are a symptom of our culture’s obsession with personal autonomy, leaving us living life as ‘I’ instead of ‘we,’” said Cardus...

Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings And Representations Of Multiple Sclerosis

When it comes to representation of people with disabilities in film and television, we’re progressively starting to see some growth and change. But while we’re starting to do away with the harmful tropes of the past, there’s still a lot of work left to be done.  People with disabilities – be it an addiction, mental illness, neurological condition, or physical disability – tend to be forced into certain categories. For the most part, they’re used more as plot devices than characters in their own right. In this way, their humanity is stripped from them, and...

A Day In The Life – Living With Chronic Pain

Living with a chronic condition can make day-to-day life very difficult, if not unbearable. From one person to the next, each experience is unique, varied mostly by the severity of their condition and their access to help. For those who live alone, it changes things and makes the process of living with a disability even more difficult. Algar, a client of ours, was kind enough to grant us a peek into what a day in his life looks like. 48 years old and living alone in a single room in a house in Toronto, Algar deals with chronic pain. This is what a typical day in his life...