Beyond Adjustment: Integration of cognitive disability into identity

Abstract This study results from a series of focus groups during which university students, all of whom were diagnosed with disabilities that affect mental or cognitive functioning, met to discuss the challenges that they face, as well as the supports and strategies that help them to surmount social and academic obstacles. Participants had a range of labels including brain injury, neurological impairment, psychiatric disorder and learning disability. Gleaned from transcripts and field notes, this paper makes explicit the processes that students used to develop a self-perception that positively integrates their experience of disability. These complex processes included self-definition of difficulties, coping with limitations, identity management and embracing one's difference. Integration of disability into identity did not appear to be a staged process for these participants. Rather, they considered the implications of being labelled disabled simultaneously and from several perspectives. Findings are discussed in terms of adjustment of two groups whose members have different experiences from those in the majority: survivors of sexual abuse and racial minorities.