Caring and intersectionality: carers can be people with disabilities, too!

Just another reminder that it’s Carers Week this week and I’m hosting the Carers’ Week-themed DUFC early next month.

Take a look at the information about halfway down the linked page under the heading “Impacts of caring”. The first sentence under the heading is:

Carers have been found to have the lowest health and wellbeing of any group yet discovered.

The points I’m most interested in are:

more than a third of carers were found to be severely to extremely severely depressed

more than one third were found to be experiencing severe or extreme stress

carers are almost twice as likely than normal to experience chronic pain

caring could be one of the leading causes of depression in Australia

not receiving treatment for a significant medical or psychological condition is extremely damaging to carers wellbeing

caring compounds the effect of any other factor that leads to reduced wellbeing

it is evident that any level of consistent, daily, immediate caring responsibility is sufficient to severely damage wellbeing

These factors say to me that carers run a real risk that they are, or will become, a person with a disability themselves as a result of their caring work. (This is not to say that anyone affected by anything outlined in the points extracted above is a person with a disability, just that some of those factors may contribute to a person being or becoming disabled.)

This is apart from the fact that a carer may have, or develop, a disability apart from the impact of hir caring work, just as anyone else can – and, as per one of the points above, that disability may have more of an impact on hir due to hir caring work.

So that’s intersectionality in one sense between being a carer and being a person with a disability: it is entirely possible (and based on the statistics above, maybe even likely) to be both.

But there’s intersectionality in another sense, too. The adverse effects of caring on a carer’s health and well-being has the potential to impact the person zie cares for. So the more difficult life is for the carer, perhaps the more difficult life may be for the person zie cares for.

Equally: the more difficult life is for the person the carer cares for, perhaps the more difficult life may be for the carer.

So: social and governmental support for carers will assist the people they care for, and support for the people who require care (ie often people with disabilities) will assist carers.

Which is not to say that that means support should be provided only to carers or only to people with disabilities – quite the opposite. Support should be provided to both groups. Maybe then we’ll see the adverse impacts on health and well-being (for both groups) decrease.

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