Chapter 8. Coping and Adjustment

Overview

AT provides a means of reducing functional limitations resulting from impairment and illness, enhancing participation in home and community activities and consequently enhancing quality of life. Adopting assets values (rather than comparative values) allows potential AT users to view devices as a means of enhancing function rather than as creating stigma. This chapter illustrates how AT can be integrated successfully into people's lives. Rehabilitation psychologists, working in collaboration with engineers and therapists skilled in AT prescription, can help potential users explore the meaning of devices, their expectations of AT benefits, the anticipated social costs and ways to come to terms with disability as one of the features, but not the defining feature, of oneself.

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