They Taught Us to Just Ignore Mental Health”: Psychiatric Disability in Teacher Education Programs

Throughout history, disability has been used as a way to justify and maintain inequalities. These inequalities are based on more than negative attitudes about disabled people; they are rooted in the epistemological system of ableism where certain bodyminds are legitimated as the norm. This dissertation explores how ableism is maintained, regulated, and/or potentially disrupted within teacher education programs and how 20 students with self-defined psychiatric disabilities experienced these programs. In this dissertation, I examine three main themes that emerged. First, I trace how participants’ education about disability generally was limited, and how education about psychiatric disability was almost wholly absent. When disability was discussed, it was overwhelmingly through the medical model, where the individual is understood as the problem to be accommodated. Participants spoke about how psychiatric disability made people “uncomfortable,” how it was “taboo” to talk about, and how it would frequently be “swept under the rug” in their programs. Second, with accommodations always being ‘retrofits’ to provide access for bodyminds never originally planned for, I explore how accommodations actually required participants to engage in extra labor and manage additional stigma within their programs. And third, I outline how participants in this research argued that despite being perceived as “not capable,” “lazy,” or “less of a candidate,” they embodied crip emotional intelligence, which positioned them to be great teachers. Mirroring critical disability studies, these participants highlighted how their epistemic knowledge offered a critical pedagogical praxis, to humanize education in ways that nondisabled people cannot, and intentionally disrupted neoliberal ableism in teacher education.