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The
distribution of disabilities at this University is different, I think, to
what most people
expect. Many of the students that I see haven’t registered as having a
disability because
they think that what they’re coping with is just part of their life and they
don’t consider it to
be a disability.
The
classic thing is to just think of the obvious disabilities such as vision
impairment or
hearing impairment or somebody with mobility problems and perhaps using a
wheelchair.
But the
truth is that most of the Disability Officers in universities, the students
with those obvious
disabilities is only a handful and the bulk of the students that we see are
people with hidden
disabilities. So the common things are things like depression, anxiety –
particularly in the age
population that we are talking about in universities.
There are
also many, many people with medical conditions such as chronic fatigue
syndrome or
epilepsy or pain is very common as well. People have been in accidents,
sporting accidents,
car accidents and they are trying to cope with their studies on large doses
of medication because
they are in pain a lot of the time.
The final
really big group are students with learning disabilities some of whom may
have been
diagnosed at school and so they’re used to managing that, but many of them
are people who
are only diagnosed very recently and so it’s a whole new ball game for them
on how they are
going to manage study with dyslexia.