WordRidden
Caregiver clichés perpetuate harmful myths about disability.
I entered the word “caregiver” into a search engine. Then I clicked “images.”
I saw pretty much what I thought I’d see. The caregivers in the stock photos are almost all white women dressed in nursing scrubs, some with stethoscopes hanging from their necks. The care recipients are almost all age seventy-plus. And none of the recipients of these service is doing much of anything, except maybe being read to or fed, looking at their caregivers with beaming gratitude.
None of the recipients look like me, which is odd because I’m one of them. For more than thirty years, I’ve employed a group of people to come to my home to assist me. I call them my pit crew. They’re not medical professionals. They’re college students, starving artists, people who dropped out of the corporate world. They don’t wear scrubs. A stethoscope is not a tool of their trade any more than a than it is for a taxi driver or an opera singer.
My pit crew members do everything from helping me get out of bed to making me gin and tonics. But nobody in these images is drinking or making a gin and tonic. And the settings in these images are almost always indoors, often in a bedroom.
There are a few shots of caregivers and their charges outdoors in a park. Why aren’t any of the images set in a bar or a casino? I don’t call my pit crew members my in-home assistants. I call them my community assistants, because we go all kinds of places together. We never just go hang in the park. How boring is that?
These caregiver stock images illustrate the pervasiveness of the caregiver cliché. It tells us that caregivers are sturdy medical professionals who help infirm shut-ins who have nothing to offer them in return except beatific smiles of gratitude.
I certainly hope my pit crew members get something more than paychecks out of all the time they spend with me, even if it’s just a few good jokes.
Perpetuating these clichés is harmful and oppressive. First, they scare people. They make it seem as if life for someone who needs daily assistance is essentially over—nothing left except an occasional trip to the park. So people whose lives, or whose loved one’s lives, might be greatly enhanced if they had community assistance, end up struggling alone.
If the “truly needy” are the homebound, then people like me who rely on our assistants to help us get out, and lead rich and active lives can be vilified as extravagant resource hogs.
These caregiver clichés are also used by austerity vultures to justify cutting social programs like the one that pays the wages of my pit crew members. Times are tough, the vultures say, so we have to make sure that scarce resources take care of the “truly needy.” If the “truly needy” are the homebound, then people like me who rely on our assistants to help us get out, and lead rich and active lives can be vilified as extravagant resource hogs. You can cut us out without hurting those in true need.
The political dialogue about community assistance has to break out of the stifling constraints of the caregiver cliché. Maybe someday, I’ll scan caregiver images and see a picture of myself with a member of my pit crew standing dutifully beside me in plain civilian clothes. We’ll be in a casino and I’ll be drinking a gin and tonic.