Four psychologists help others to see

By Rebecca A. Clay

When Phyllis J. Burson, PhD, applied to graduate school in psychology, her undergraduate grades, GRE scores and recommendations seemed to guarantee admission. There was just one problem: She was going blind.

The school's admissions committee worried that Burson's disability would make it impossible for her to function as a psychologist and required her to undergo two special interviews. In the end she was accepted into the program--but only if she agreed to be a subject in the department's ex-periments on sensory perception.

More than 25 years later, the memory still rankles, but Burson's thriving psychotherapy practice has proven the admissions committee's fears ungrounded.

Today Burson is just one of a handful of psychologists who are in the forefront of promoting her disability as an advantage. She and several other blind psychologists are working to make APA--and the discipline itself--more hospitable to people with disabilities of all sorts.

Navigating the workplace

In the decades since Burson was in graduate school, life has changed dramatically for people with visual impairments. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, for instance, requires employers and others to make "reasonable accommodations" for people with disabilities. Technological changes have also helped.

Until recently, volunteer readers, Braille and books on tape were the only way that people with visual impairments could handle written material. Now screen-reading software makes writing and editing their own work easier and lets them use e-mail and take advantage of online journals and other Internet resources. Scanners allow them to "read" just about anything they can scan into their computers.

Despite these advances, however, almost three-quarters of working-age Americans with visual disabilities still lack jobs. That's because technology and legislation like the ADA aren't enough, says Katherine S. Schneider, PhD, director of training and senior psychologist at the University of Wisconsin­Eau Claire's counseling service. Young people with visual disabilities just aren't getting the special mentoring they need to help them succeed or even consider the possibility of work, she says.

Blind since birth, Schneider got through grad school knowing of only one other blind psychology student. Although his presence reassured her that blind people could become psychologists, she didn't know the day-to-day details of how he managed his schoolwork and how he proposed to practice psychology once he finished. Lacking role models, she has invented her own solutions to problems. A student spends five hours a week reading Schneider's paperwork to her, for instance.

"I have a talking computer and scanner, but sometimes it's just quicker to go through stuff with a human," says Schneider. "We cruise through pounds of paperwork."

To keep others from suffering from the lack of mentors, Schneider would like to see a special disabilities page on the APA Web Site. Offering a list of psychologists with disabilities who would be willing to answer questions, the site could put other students and psychologists with disabilities just a mouse click away from potential mentors. The site could also help educate employers about people with disabilities, says Schneider, who had to send out more than 150 résumés before landing her first job in the mid-1970s. The problem isn't so much overt discrimination by employers as their fear of the unknown, she says. Employers are often wary about taking a chance on disabled candidates when there are equally well-qualified candidates without disabilities, she explains.

That fear can express itself in strange ways, says Schneider. At one of her early job interviews, for instance, the interviewers fixated on the bizarre question of what Schneider would do in the unlikely event someone started shooting up heroin in her classroom. "They didn't quite know how to ask, 'What are the problems you encounter and how can we help?'" she says, laughing at the memory of that interview. Employers should be upfront with questions about how to accommodate the person's disability, she says, rather than tiptoe around the issue out of fear of giving offense or violating the ADA's anti-discrimination rules.

Employers also need to change the way they see disability, she adds. Instead of viewing people with disabilities as liabilities, she says, they should realize that blind psychologists' empathy, resourcefulness and ability to raise others' awareness of minority, disability and accommodation issues make them assets.

"People think, 'I'll just be getting myself a bunch of headaches if I take on a person with a disability,'" says Schneider. "They should think, 'I'd be getting something extra, because this person is used to solving problems.'"

Bringing extra value to psychotherapy

Blind psychologists who practice psychotherapy often subscribe to this "something extra" theory.

Robert A. De Young, PhD, who lost his sight to retinal cancer at age 8, believes blindness is an advantage for the type of work he does, for example. As a postdoctoral fellow at Chicago Health Outreach/Heartland Alliance for Human Rights and Human Needs, he provides psychotherapy to refugees and torture victims for participants in two of the alliance's programs: the Bosnian Mental Health Program and the Marjorie Kovler Center for the Treatment of Survivors of Torture.

"The fact that my disability gives me a minority identity helps me understand my clients' experiences," he says, adding that some clients have physical disabilities and all have mind-body issues resulting from trauma. "That kind of identification leads to empathy and compassion."

Feeling specially qualified to offer psychotherapy doesn't mean that De Young doesn't sometimes feel isolated within his own profession, however. To address that problem, he conducted a survey of professional needs and concerns for psychologists who have visual impairments and chaired a panel of psychologists with disabilities at a 1998 APA Annual Convention symposium.

De Young has recently been named a member of APA's Committee on Disability Issues in Psychology. As a member of the committee, he plans to "promote a mentoring program and a better connection between psychologists with disabilities." Phyllis Burson also sees her blindness as a professional advantage.

"Clients often like the idea that I can't see them if they're overweight or self-conscious about their looks," says Burson, now a private practitioner in Silver Spring, Md., and a psychology professor at the University of Maryland's University College. "Others appreciate the fact that I've faced difficult issues in my own life, which gives them hope and inspiration."

Of course, many people with visual impairments seek Burson out specifically, knowing that she will understand their grief over their lost eyesight, fears of dependence and other issues. But soon more and more psychologists will be seeing patients who are blind, says Burson, pointing out that the nation is aging rapidly. She offers these tips to sighted psychologists working with visually impaired clients: Learn about visual impairment by reading the literature and consulting with blind people. Understand the special issues blind clients face. And encourage blind clients to seek out others with visual impairments.

Most importantly, she says, sighted psychologists should examine their own attitudes about disability. "It's important to help your clients think in terms of what they can do, rather than what they can't," she says.

The next generation of blind psychologists is already working to remove even more of the barriers that people with visual impairments and other disabilities face.

Scott Feldman is one of them, although it took him a long time even to admit he was blind. Born with a neuromuscular disorder, he started losing his ability to read around age 20. Hoping for a cure, he spent the next four or five years trying to balance between the sighted and unsighted worlds. He finally capitulated when he realized he could spend the next 50 or 60 years waiting.

Now 29, Feldman is a doctoral student in clinical psychology with a specialization in disability studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago. His goal is to develop structured interventions that promote positive self-identity in people with disabilities. His dissertation will attempt to answer the question of how people come up with positive self-images despite negative stereotypes.

Feldman already has some ideas. Coming together with other people with disabilities is one way, he says, noting that people with disabilities sometimes think that their experiences are unique.

"People sometimes attribute their problems to something within them, which creates a lot of shame," says Feldman, adding that he's known some blind students who have dropped out of school convinced they were stupid. "When you come together with others and discover that they're experiencing the same problems, you realize that it's not a problem with you but with society."

Feldman is already putting his theories into practice through his work with the American Psychological Association of Graduate Students' Task Force on Disabilities. In that role, he is trying to convince APA and other publishers to make books available for purchase in electronic format. Doing so would make books accessible to many people with learning disabilities and physical problems as well as students with visual impairments, he says. The task force hasn't received any definite commitments yet, but remains hopeful.

"I'm optimistic about our field, because I've seen how much progress we've made in our treatment of other minority groups," says Feldman. "Our field is the interface between the person and society. We're really in a position to change things for the better for people with disabilities."

Rebecca A. Clay is a writer in Washington, D.C.



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