 The lives of people with disabilities are assumed to be of low quality, whatever environmental factors mediate the impact of their impairments, and their own testimony to the contrary is seen as inherently unreliable. Their adaptations to their impairments appear not as instances of the universal processes of adjustment to changed circumstances, but as disability-specific strategies for recovering the ground that has been lost, or for covering up its loss through benign self-deception (2005a: 11).