Too often our society gets trapped into identifying a person based on a label. In the medical profession, your label defines how the medical team treats you. For a person with diabetes, an endocrinologist checks blood sugar levels but does not look to the whole person to diagnose a heart condition or seek other causes for changes in the numbers.

Often, when a person with a significant disability goes to a medical appointment, he or she is ignored by the doctor as the questions are directed to any accompanying staff or family member. The medical professional assumes that disability somehow renders the person incapable of speaking for himself or of asking questions about medical treatment.

The Department of Social Services is a business that provides services to clients. Some agencies prefer consumers. In the human services field, we strive as much as possible to begin to separate people from labels that limit them. In a person-centered field we have persons with brain injury, for example. This is still a label.

At the Center for Disability Rights, we as much as possible use a different label – person. Our Mission Statement is: CDR works for the full integration, independence and civil rights for individuals with disabilities. This is one thing that first caught my attention when I started to work here. What a concept – to think about people as individuals, as people with different goals and plans and situations! And what a challenge to seek to work with them as individuals and help them create plans that meet their individual ideas.

Of course I still hear the complaints and concerns from the people I work with: “You don’t have any idea what my life is like, what it’s like to be me.” When I hear those words… I can only agree. No one else knows me, my life and background and the way situations impact me. And although I may want to, it is impossible to really put myself in another person’s shoes, walk their walk, or to truly understand that point of view.

When I first started working in this field, I came across a book that really taught me to look beyond the labels to see who the person and to work with each person as a unique individual. Several years ago, I was at a Young Adult Book fair and found Stuck in Neutral by Terry Trueman. (Of course basing my first impression on the title, I originally thought that it was probably about a boy and his cars! And was I ever wrong.) This book helped me understand better the danger of looking at a person and making a judgment based on just a label or diagnosis.

The book is written from the first person point of view, so the reader gets to understand the thoughts and reasoning of Shawn. Stuck in Neutral is about a boy with a special gift: he can remember everything he has ever heard, perfectly, with total recall. That’s the good news. The bad news is that no one knows it because his lack of control of his muscles prevents him from speaking or responding as requested by the doctors and consultants whose job is to label him and his potential for learning. Each member of Shawn’s family has a different idea about what he can do, and what he is or is not interested in, yet no one really understands or appreciates him as a total person.

Over time, through the different jobs I have held at CDR I have begun to better know others whose lives have been changed by a traumatic brain injury. While they may all share the same label, some use a wheelchair and some do not. For some, memories remain clear and for others memory is elusive and flitting.

Each person I work with in the Traumatic Brain Injury field may have a similar diagnosis, but each is so different that a label cannot begin to define who the person really is. At CDR, too, I have begun to work with people who have a variety of labels… most of the time, the label I use is “co workers”!

So I urge all of you who might read this to take the time to really get to know the people who surround you, to move beyond first impressions, to know and understand the dreams and goals, the abilities, gifts and interests that make each person unique and more importantly to look beyond labels and titles that limit us in our appreciation of each other.