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Careers and professional development

Personal space - Remove the barriers

Peter Stannett on equal opportunities in psychology.

18 December 2002

I am someone with athetoid cerebral palsy and a strong interest in physiology and psychology. I graduated in psychology and then completed an MSc in health psychology. One of my initial (but perhaps naive) attractions to studying psychology and then following a career in psychology was that I thought it was a relatively caring occupation and that it valued individual differences. I was also informed that it might reconcile my interest and ability in science with deficits in motor control resulting from cerebral palsy. But having made numerous job applications and visits to see practising psychologists to discuss possibilities of working in the profession, I find a profound resistance to employing disabled people in the profession in general. This was even more heightened when I explored the possibility of working in their own field or department.

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