My Experience with People First Language

One of the things I am most thankful for as an OT student is the year I took off between undergraduate and graduate school.  At the time, I saw it as mostly a negative; all my peers were a year ahead of me, it pushed back my 'life plan' a year, and I didn't know how to occupy my time. That is until I applied for a job as a teachers aid at a local school for children with special needs, Access Group Inc. I decided if I was going to take a year off, I was going to spend that year learning first hand from therapists and teachers in a field that I hoped one day, I would be lucky enough to join.

Access didn't just teach me a couple things, it taught me everything. As the teachers aid, I was with the kids 100% of the day. I helped teach our Association Method in the mornings, was the leader of Simon says during break, supervised and assisted during Art, was the lunch lady and designated food cutter at lunch, and even put them in their cars at the end of the day and gave the parents a brief play-by-play of the events of the day before the car behind started honking. I'm not going to lie, it was exhausting. But by being with these kids so much, you really get to know them. You see their insecurities, their fears, their triggers, and help them learn how to talk it out.  One of the recurring things I saw in some of my kids was low self esteem.  Low self esteem because for some of them, they had been constantly reminded, whether from a difficult task or someone labeling them, that they had a disability.

At Access, we fostered an diagnose free environment.  They weren't kids with apraxia or down syndrome, they were just kids. I think this is a mindset that every person and future clinician should take on. The first step of that is to teach the importance of people first language.  Not because it's "politically correct" but because it reminds that individual that they are a human being first before anything else. Second, I think people need to understand when the diagnosis is even relevant.  Nine times out of ten, in a social conversation, someones diagnosis is not needed to complete the story.  Instead of being 'a boy with autism in my class' he should just be a boy in the class.  Why does the person you're telling the story to need to know he has autism?  Diagnoses shouldn't be used as adjectives. There's really no need.

As a future OT, I think this is an extremely important part of being an effective clinician.  We will be using diagnoses on a daily basis so it's easy to get caught up and think of them as a descriptive way to distinguish our clients.  Being aware of this, and actively promoting a people first approach will establish respect with clients and build self esteem.

Thanks for reading my two cents!

And for future reference, I'm probably going to bring up my crazy kiddos from Access any chance I get on future posts. :)

Best,

A Moderately Stressed OT Student