Empowerment and strengths-based advocacy in practice with clients who have developmental disabilities

L. Rogers, S;  Walsh, W., &  Whitney, Rondalyn V. (2022) Empowerment and strengths-based advocacy in practice with clients who have developmental disabilities, SIS Quarterly Practice Connections, 7(4).

Occupational therapy empowers people to author their own lives, to perform the day-to-day tasks they aspire to perform, to create a narrative of occupational coherence, and to live a life that they can fully occupy through their own agency. Our professional identity is powerfully expressed in the American Occupational Therapy Association’s (AOTA’s) Vision 2025: “Occupational therapy maximizes health, well-being, and quality of life for all people, populations, and communities through effective solutions that facilitate participation in everyday living” (2017, p. 1). We would argue that although a strengths-based approach is fundamental to the ethos of professional practice, using the meta-skill of strengths-based practice can often become eclipsed by the linear mindset that is often found in the traditional medical model approach to health care practice.