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Hi All Well now we have all agreed on the spelling of 'Here Here' and the meaning of the same..anyone like a stab at defining 'Epistemologies' ? People to reitterate that there is a 'tendency for disabled people to distance themselves from the community of mentaly ill people/cognitively impared people/sick people' or whatever. I think this is an easy throw away which is difficult to support in practice. 'Communities' of people with different disabilities do not decide to distance themselves from one another, it's more that we are socially cultured to see people in groups and then respond to individuals who we see as being in that group as being representative of a whole 'community of others'. To get away from all this, and to empower ourselves and others we should surely accept that we are all disabled and not disabled, male and female, black and white, gay or straight geriatric or paediatric etc etc FAR MORE ALIKE ONE ANOTHER THAN DIFFERENT FROM ONE ANOTHER. And that everyone we meet sees themselves (as do we all) primarily as an individual and not as a representative of a group. I have been told that there is a dislike within the community of spinal cord injury wheelchair users to distance themselves from tose of us who are sick, since such spinal cord injured people have finally suceeded on geting recognised the fact that they are not ill, and do not need nursing care but full access to society. We..the sick ones just confuse things for them the spinal cord injured ones. I have never heard or seen written down a single attributable statement to this effect actually made by a person with spinal cord injury. Whenever I have mixed with other disabled people with different impairments 'clinical diagnosis' has never been discussed. In fact I could not categorically say I have met anyone with a spinal cord injury as this is not externally obvious and there are numerous reasons why an individual might chose to use a wheelchair, especially at a conference. Surely we must be careful to sort out the difference between what is said to be true and what we actually find to be true? Amaryllis %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%