The Sad Disabled Person: Disability Tropes

[ID: A thumbnail with a screenshot of lieutenant dan from the movie Forrest Gump, a man with white skin, short black hair and stitches on his eyebrow, looking sadly at the viewer while sitting in a hospital bed. Over half the image is a blue background with the words "Disability Tropes, The Sad Disabled Person" written over the top. /End ID]

CW: This post is going to discuss some heavy topics, including ableism, mental health struggles, suicide and eugenics.

It surprised me that when I went back through my backlog of disability writing advice, I hadn't actually talked about "The Sad Disabled Person" trope yet, especially considering how often I reference it in my other trope discussions.
You may have heard it go by another name, "The bitter disabled person," "The depressed disabled person", "Disability is the end" or how I've referred to it in other posts, "Woe is me", but they all refer to more-or-less the same thing: a trope where a disabled character is sad or upset about their disability. In less extreme examples of the trope, it might stop at just them being sad, but more often than not, in this trope, their disability directly leads to depression and severe mental health struggles. In stories that are aiming for a more uplifting or positive tone, the sad disabled person trope is the setup to the "inspiring turn-around" where the character "overcomes" their disability and the mental health issues it may have caused, or it's the set-up to the miracle cure trope, where the character's disability is cured but not before showing us just how miserable their life is with their disability to justify the cure and the means they used to get it. In other, darker or more tear-jerker-style examples, the character (as well as those around them) believe that their disability means the end of their goals, what they want out of life, and any chance at success or happiness, and they don't really get better. For some characters who fall into this version of the trope, death is preferable to their current situation, and they'll make sure the audience knows that.

It's a very common trope that connects into almost every other disability trope out there, and to be honest, I'm kind of glad I haven't spoken about it yet, because my thoughts on it have changed quite a bit since starting this blog. I think for the sake of honesty, it would be best to disclose that I really don't like this trope and would be happy to go the rest of my life without seeing it, at least in it's current form. Despite that though, I think there's a lot of nuance to it that also gets overlooked, and the way I've seen some other people in disability writing advice spaces online talk about why it should be avoided ignores a lot of people's very real lived experiences, which can be just as harmful as the trope itself. So I want to talk about it. Personally, I do think it should still be avoided for the most part, but I also want to talk about why some people in the disabled community don't agree, and when it's actually necessary to include it in your work.

So let's start by looking at the contributing factors that make a lot of people dislike this trope:

1. Ties to real-life stereotypes that can and do cause very real harm
2. Misunderstanding of (or lack of research into) the negative aspects of the disabled experience by authors and creators
3. Oversimplification and generalisation
4. Sheer, overwhelming overuse

The Stereotypes tied to it

The Sad disabled person trope stems from a stereotype about disabled people that we are always sad and miserable, which in turn, comes from the stereotype that disability takes away your ability to do... really anything. When I worked on a disability awareness program, you would be shocked at the number of people who genuinely thought that when we were done with our talks, we just went home and sat in the dark all day and were cared for by our parents (we were all adults) or nursing staff. the amount of people who thought that hiring us was just an act of charity that "gave us something to do," that were shocked that we, the disabled employees, ran the program, that we drove ourselves, that this was a job that paid us, that we had hobbies, friends, spouses, kids, family, pets, responsibilities or any semblance of a normal life was pretty jarring, even as someone who'd been disabled for their whole life and has heard a lot of ableism in my time. The bar for disabled people is so low, and when you think a group of people's lives are that bland and empty, especially when you contrast it to the "normal person's" life many disabled people would have "lost", you can easily see where the "sad disabled person" stereotype (and the trope) comes from.
While public understanding is improving, there are still a lot of people who believe these things. Probably more than you would think. Most visibly disabled people have at least one story of a random stranger coming up to them and saying they'd rather kill themselves than live with our disabilities, because all they've ever heard about disability is how bad it is and how we can't do anything anymore. The first time someone said that to me was when I was 4 years old; I was playing with a friend I'd made at day-care, and when we asked his mother if he could come over to my house on the weekend, instead of answering us, his mum just told me how sad I must be and how she'd rather kill herself than have to live like me.

Now, imagine for a moment that someone who believes these stereotypes and holds that opinion, suddenly becomes disabled, because disability can and does effect everyone eventually. You can see how, on an individual level, that stereotype can very quickly become harmful. It almost self-perpetuates itself in a way. mental health issues are normal when you're learning to deal with a new disability, but if everything you know about this new disability is from this stereotype that is so negative and you think you have nothing to look forward to anymore, it will get dangerous, very quick. At best, it slows the mental side of the healing process down because you have to unlearn so much, and at worst, well not everyone can unlearn it. Not everyone gets the chance.

But stereotypes like these can do serious harm on a systemic level too, because they can lead the general public, as well as people in positions of power, to believe disabled people inherently have a poor quality of life. This outlook can, in turn, make it's way into laws and policies that effect our real lives for the worst.
I've heard a decent amount of non-disabled people argue against systems like Australia's NDIS, a program that is supposed to improve the quality of life for disabled people, by saying that no matter what the government does to help us, disability always causes suffering and we will always be miserable because of that, so why even bother? This is an ignorant comment, of course, but if enough people believe it and that impacts how they vote, it can have a very real impact on our lives, it can stop the problems with these kinds of systems from being fixed, or it can stop new systems like this from being created elsewhere.
In more extreme cases, it can even impact how we live and die. Eugenics ideologies often use the perceived "inherent lower quality of life" of disabled people to justify eradicating us. They say, instead of helping disabled people who are struggling, it would be more merciful to kill us and end our suffering. The Nazi's used this tactic to get the more "empathetic" parts of the population comfortable with their death camps, by using them on disabled people first and telling the public it was an act of mercy to kill us. There was more to it, of course, but playing into this very stereotype was one of many ways they justified their actions.

The "sad disabled person" trope is, admittedly, a very small drop in the bucket of reasons why people continue to believe these kinds of stereotypes, but it does play into and help spread and perpetuate them none-the-less. So, given the impact they can have on disabled people both past and present, it's pretty clear to see why people have some pretty strong feelings about the trope and the stereotypes tied to it based on this factor alone. But as I said earlier, this isn't the only reason.

Generalisation, Oversimplification and Misunderstandings of the actual negative parts of being disabled

Ok, but Cy, you even said it yourself before, mental health issues are normal and expected for a lot of disabled people, especially when they're new to it. Lots of disabled people struggle with their mental health because of their disabilities! Pretending that life with a disability is all sunshine and rainbows can be just as harmful! So why is depicting those struggles and the negative stuff a bad thing now?

You're right, all of that is true. My post about the "perfect prosthetic" in particular really drove home how harmful it can be when you ignore the negative impacts of a disability in your work. But depicting the negatives that come with being disabled isn't the issue. I'm going to combine points 2 and 3 in this section I think, because they're kind of connected, but the way I see it, there's a few overarching issues with how this trope specifically depicts the negative parts of being disabled.

The way a lot of non-disabled people write this sadness is in a kind of... flat, generalised way that kind of misunderstands where that sadness comes from. A character is sad because they're in a wheelchair, because being in a wheelchair is always sad. They can't do anything because they're in a wheelchair, because people in wheelchairs can't do anything. But in reality, the reason behind that sadness is very rarely just because they're in a wheelchair.

Maybe it's because people started treating them differently. They can't go out partying with their friends anymore, because the club isn't accessible to them. They can't get a job, not because they're not capable, but because no one will give them a chance and hire them (yes that is illegal, just like it's illegal for buildings to not be accessible, but it still happens anyway). Because they can't get a job, depending on where they live, they might not be able to afford to get the medical care they need, or the mobility aids that will allow them to do more things.
There is always more to it, and you'll notice, the more you dig, the more the actual issues tend to be connected to external factors, at least in part. Being in a wheelchair wouldn't be a problem for this character if the people around them didn't treat them differently, that's not their or their wheelchair's fault. It wouldn't be a problem if businesses actually followed the law and made their buildings accessible like they're supposed to, and hired disabled people who were ready, willing and capable to work like they're supposed to. It wouldn't be a problem if they could get the medical care and mobility aids they need, but they can't because of the aforementioned difficulty finding work. These are examples of societal barriers, and for a lot of people, they are some of the worst parts of being disabled, because they don't need to be that way. They could be changed and fixed if people would just listen.

This is also where the "lack of research" part comes in too. Quite often, I've noticed that when people write about disabilities they don't have, they don't always do the necessary research into what supports actually exist. A really common example is driving. I made a disability 101 post about it a few months ago, because so many people just assume it's something physically disabled people can't do at all, and don't even bother to double check that assumption. But in reality, there are a lot of modifications that can be made to a car, truck, motorbike or even other less common vehicles like planes, that allows people with all kinds of physical disabilities to drive (or fly) them. But if you don't know that, and don't think to look it up, you would probably write that your wheelchair using character is sad because they can't drive themselves around and this has contributed to isolation a feeling of loosing their independence. But that's based on misinformation and misunderstandings.

It doesn't just happen with driving. Some other examples I've seen include people not knowing about academic accommodations in university, and writing that an autistic character couldn't go to study because of it. Not knowing that people with spinal injuries can swim or do various other sports, so making plot points around the character having to give up on the sport they love. Not knowing that outside of the US, mobility aids are often subsidised or paid in full by government services, and using the device's cost to explain why a character who lives in one of these countries can't get the mobility aid that would best suit them.

Of course, there are exceptions to all of these things, because disability isn't a monolith. Some physical disabilities can't be accommodated with vehicle modifications, you can't modify a car to be safe for someone with no eyes for example. An autistic person might still struggle in academia even with accommodations because of things that can't really be accounted for, or maybe their university just has really bad disability services (which is unfortunately common). The person with a spinal injury might have found a way to do the sport, but the adapted version's just not the same, or there might be some factor that makes it more complicated for them. Lots of people fall through the cracks in government support systems, and just because it's something that some people can technically get on these programs, doesn't always mean you'll get approved for it. The thing is though, if that's the reason, you need to acknowledge that, and not just shrug and say "they can't do [x] because they're disabled". As we talked about, it usually goes deeper than that.

But it's not always societal issues.
Sometimes, a character just needs time. Time to heal, time to learn how to adjust, time to recover, and grief is part of that.

A really good example of what I mean can be seen in The Legend of Korra, specifically in the final episode of season 3. Korra is injured badly and temporarily paralysed in her legs during the final fight. She uses a wheelchair while she heals and does not handle this well because her whole identity is tied up in her physical and bending abilities. That is realistic. But her lack of ability to continue her job as the avatar here is attributed to be because of her wheelchair. The president of Republic City even says, "Who will protect the world while the Avatar is in a wheelchair?"
But we've seen that, in this world, a wheelchair would not necessarily be a barrier for someone like Korra protecting people. We know this because of Tio, a non-bending wheelchair user from the previous series that fought in the siege on The Day of Black Sun and then proceeded to join Team Avatar in late season 3. He was an admittedly minor character, but he shows that, using this story's own pre-established world, a wheelchair on it's own wouldn't have been a barrier. especially not when it's given to the world's most powerful bender who can bend the terrain around herself and fly (or I suppose, shoot herself into the air). But no one acknowledges any of that, and just blames the fact she has to sit down for a bit.

Does this mean I think Korra should have been out there immediately fighting again? Hell no, she needed to rest and heal. She was hurt, and grieving but that's what stopped her from going out, her still-healing injuries and grief. Not the fact she needed a wheelchair. I don't expect Korra to have been in the headspace to actually acknowledge that, but someone else could have. Her friends that we see she was writing to, her family, Katara (honestly, if anyone should have brought it up, it would have made the most sense for it to be her). Hell, even Zaheer could have said something if she'd stayed in the wheelchair a little bit longer.

Of course, despite all of this, sometimes the disability itself is the source of the sadness and difficulty. I'm an amputee, and part of that is phantom pain. While not every amputee or person with a limb difference experiences phantom pain, for those of us that do, it sucks. There's no if, ands or buts about it. It just sucks. My back is messed up as a side effect of using two prosthetic legs long-term. Again, not everyone who uses prosthetic legs will experience this, maybe that can even be entirely prevented in the future, but it was the best option that was available at the time and the damage is done, no accommodation can change the fact it hurts now. I have a heat pack in the microwave for that as I write this to help, and my loved ones being more patient and understanding can help to not make things worse, but the pain will still be there. I'm also chronically ill and that's probably the most difficult of my disabilities to deal with. I was never really sad about not having legs, the other social stuff I've already mentioned that come with it, yes, but not the fact I'm missing my legs. But I have been depressed due to my chronic illness directly before. It stops me from going out, not because people are terrible (though that has become a slightly bigger factor post-COVID lockdowns) but because I simply don't have the energy to. I've cried about being sick all the time, because being sick makes you feel terrible just on its own, even without social factors like a lack of accommodation, but that does make it worse. It won't make me feel any less sick, but it would be easier if people were more understanding about the fact I can't control all this, it would make going out way easier if everyone still masked and cared about keeping their community safe, if people in positions of power like doctors and government actually believed me when I said I need help.
I bring all this up, because yes, sometimes, the disability itself is the cause of sadness, and that's valid, but as an author or writer you can't stop at the surface level stuff. The disability itself is rarely the only contributing factor, but it is where most non-disabled people stop when writing about us, and that's where it becomes an issue.

Overuse of the trope

The final point, and to me and many others it's the biggest part of why this trope is so disliked.

Sometimes, the problem is not that it's unrealistic or a misrepresentation to show all the negative parts of being disabled, and for a character to really struggle with it. Some people will see the societal barriers I mentioned before, and always blame themselves and their disability for them. For some people, the worst parts of their disability are just the inherent negatives that come with it. Some people's disabilities really do make it hard or impossible to do things they love and limits their lives. There will be exceptions to every single thing I've talked about here, and sometimes a disability does make people miserable. that sucks, but it's a lot of people's reality and ignoring that and pretending those people don't exist just hurts everyone in the long run. Sometimes, the use of the sad disabled person trope is realistic and we NEED to acknowledge that.

BUT

For a long, long time, this was the only way disability was depicted in media. it's not the only experience of disability though, and it took a long time for any other experiences of disability to get the spotlight.

A lot of the time, the sheer overuse of the trope is a problem in and of itself. Once again, when a decent chunk of the population already believes you're entire community's quality of life is terrible, and the majority of the media out there about people like you reinforces this idea, it will cause a problem, no matter how well or respectfully any one individual story handles it.

Personally, even though I've come to accept there are times when a story needs to have it's disabled character be sad about their disability, like for example, when they first become disabled, I still try to avoid anything I know that uses this trope too much, because I just don't like it, for all the reasons I've already discussed. However, the biggest reason why I don't like it, is because it's absolutely everywhere. Even when I go out of my way to avoid it, I can't. It shows up constantly in books, in games, it shows up in TV and anime, in comics, movies. Even when it's not a big focus of the story, it's everywhere and I can't seem to get a break from it. And this is things being better. It used to be so much worse when I was a kid!

My dad's favourite movie when I was a kid was Forest Gump. He still quotes it all the time, he has several Forest Gump-themed shirts, including a few that are just printed lines from the movie. When he went to the US he made a point to go to the bubba-gump shrimp company and try as many of the dishes mentioned in the movie as he could (that's also where his favourite shirt came from).
And I could never bring myself to tell him that I HATE that movie with a burning passion. I hate it, I hate it so much, and specifically, I hate Lieutenant Dan. But, as an adult, I can recognise that it's not entirely Dan's fault.
I don't think Lieutenant Dan is written especially poorly from a disability perspective. He's cliché and is a pretty perfect example of the Sad Disabled Person trope, yes, but it's not an unrealistic depiction, especially for the time period the film was set in.

The problem was not that it wasn't realistic for someone in his position though. The problem was he was one of so many people like me in media saying a life like mine wasn't worth living. He wasn't the only one, or even the worst example of it by far, he comes around in the end after all and the whole point of his arc is to drive home that his life is, in fact, still worth living and things do get better, but it still wormed it's way into younger me's head. It was while watching Forest Gump, specifically the scene where Dan first becomes disabled and says he wished Forrest had left him to die.

"There must be something wrong with me if I don't feel that way too."

"There must be something wrong with me for not hating my life."

This would have been when I was about 10, and again, it was not this movie's fault alone. Everywhere I looked, I saw only depictions of people with disabilities saying how much they hated themselves and specifically, the part of themselves that made them like me. Pair that with the adults around me saying things like my friend's mother had said, other kids telling me they felt bad for me and all these other little things. I just... didn't get it. this wasn't some defiant way to show I had unshakable confidence or any inspiring BS, I just didn't feel the same way, I didn't hate myself, I didn't hate my disability and I genuinely didn't understand why I should. So, that must have meant I was missing something that everyone else could see. That must have meant I was broken.

I never once thought my disability was what made me broken, but my inability to understand the constant negativity directed at it did. I look back on that feeling as an adult and am so angry that anyone, let alone a child, was made to feel broken for just being happy. Not even happy, just content.
For there to have been so much content with this trope out there that a 10-year-old felt broken for not agreeing... says a lot.

Sometimes, it's not that it's unrealistic or a misunderstanding of the disabled experience or anything like that, it's just overused. When it's done poorly, that makes it worse, for sure, but sometimes, it really is just that it's everywhere, and some of us disabled people would really just like to see something, really anything else.

So, should you use this trope or avoid it?

As I mentioned earlier, I am exceptionally biased here. I could very happily go the rest of my life without seeing this trope... or at least the most common version of it that pins all of the blame for the character's sadness and difficulty on their disability alone without acknowledging external factors, or the versions where it's focused solely on the valid grief of newly disabled people. And that's not because it's not realistic, there's just a lot of it and I've got my own issues surrounding it, so do a lot of disabled people.

So, whether you should use it will come down to the story you're telling. If a character becomes disabled in your story, there probably should be grief shown and it shouldn't be glossed over. I've seen that grief stage get skipped with amputee characters in particular, and it always ends up doing more harm than good because it ends up contributing to other tropes like "The Perfect prosthetic". So if you're going to include a character's disabling event, you need to actually follow through with it, but don't let that be all they are either. Also, keep the points we've already discussed in mind. Do your research, make sure your reasons don't just boil down to disabled = sad, and keep the real-world stereotypes in mind.

At the end of the day though, this is still an overused trope that, even when handled well, is absolutely everywhere so if it's not absolutely necessary like the situation above, I'd personally recommend against it.
One of the easiest ways to do that without falling into other equally questionable tropes, and the way I'd like to see more of in general for a variety of reasons, is by having characters who are already disabled when your story starts. There are some cases where an already disabled character will still have moments of sadness, true, but it's much easier to avoid this trope in more natural ways this way.

I would also like to specifically take a moment to ask creators to stop making disabled characters sad about "what they lost" when they were born with or acquired their disability so early in life they have no memories of life without it. You have to remember this is their normal, they didn't "loose" anything, and in my experience, both as someone who falls into this category and someone who's worked with and is friends with others who are too, we typically only start getting sad about it when other people's expectations are put on us, or we're excluded and mistreated. We don't really have the same grief period others have, there's nothing to get used to that we weren't doing from the start (excluding degenerative conditions I suppose, but they're not the ones I tend to see in media). That's not to say it never happens, but it's pretty rare compared to how often I see it in media, and again, usually heavily influenced by external factors like societal barriers.

So that's my thoughts on the "Sad disabled person" trope, at least right now. As I mentioned, my thoughts on this trope have changed a lot, even since starting to talk about disability in media, and they very well might change again in the future.

Despite my (current) feelings on the topic, it is more complicated than the internet likes to acknowledge - which is true for most things - and I really wanted to try and give this trope the nuance it deserves despite my bias. I don't know if I did a good job with that, but I can at least recognise this trope has it's place and (when it's handled with enough care) can be representative of real disabled people's experiences. Pretending those people don't exist when we talk about it doesn't help anyone. But on the flip side, the hate towards this trope isn't unwarranted either, though it is possibly a bit misdirected a lot of the time. It's often built on genuinely harmful stereotypes, uninformed beliefs and misconceptions, and it's sheer overuse makes it exceptionally hard to avoid.
So if this is something you're planning to include, do so with caution and be mindful. At the very least, you should hire a sensitivity reader or consultant if you can, even if you are disabled yourself, because it is a complicated topic. I'd also recommend finding other articles on this trope by other disabled people from both points of view. I recommend that for anything I write about, I do not and can never represent the entire disabled community on any topic, but especially not on a topic like this, and there's good points to consider on both sides of the argument that you should be aware of, no matter what you decide to do.