This is an explanation of the social model of disablement. Maybe this well help clarify your concerns.
Marta
The origins of what would later be called the ‘social model’ can be traced to an essay by a disabled Briton: A Critical Condition, written by Paul Hunt and published in 1966. In this paper, Hunt argued that because people with impairments are viewed as ‘unfortunate, useless, different, oppressed and sick’ they pose a direct challenge to commonly held Western values
According to Hunt, people with impairments were viewed as: unfortunate’ because they are unable to ‘enjoy’ material and social benefits of modern society, ‘useless’ because they are considered unable to contribute to ‘economic good of the community’, and marked as ‘minority group’ members because, like black people and homosexuals, they are perceived as ‘abnormal’ and ‘different’
This analysis led Hunt to the view that disabled people encounter ‘prejudice which expresses itself in discrimination and oppression.’
The relationship between economics and cultural attitudes toward disabled people is a vital part of Hunt’s understanding of the experience of impairment and disability in western society.
Ten-years later, the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) developed Paul Hunt's work further, leading to the UPIAS assertion, in 1976, that disability was:
‘the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organisation which takes little or no account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from participation in the mainstream of social activities.’
The vital feature of the UPIAS statement is that for the first time disability was described in terms of restrictions imposed on disabled people by social organization.
It was not until 1983 that the disabled academic, Mike Oliver, described the ideas that lay behind the UPIAS definition as the ‘social model of disability.’ The 'social model', was extended and developed by academics like Vic Finkelstein, Mike Oliver and Colin Barnes in the UK and Gerben DeJong in the USA (amongst others), and extended by Disabled Peoples’ International to include all disabled people.
While the original formulation of the social model may have been developed by people with physical impairments, the insight that it offered was quickly seen as having value to all disabled people. The construction of the social model defines 'disability' quite simply as: ‘the social consequences of having an impairment.’ The impairment is a part of the experience.
Again, I recommend that you read Michael Oliver, he has devoted two books to the subject.
Marta