The long road to the "statute"

The story of people with disabilities is, as was repeatedly brought up in our podcast "1 cm", the story of the importance of being noticed and recognised. Above all by other people, but almost always also by public institutions in the form of the "Statut du salarié handicapé" (often simply called the "Statut"). Many of them have had to wade through a bureaucratic jungle at a time when there is already an enormous burden on their shoulders – physically, mentally and emotionally.

Tamara Schuster, now coordinator for the Board of Aldermen in the municipality of Niederanven, wanted to return to the primary labour market several years ago. She still remembers the tests that were supposed to help her decide whether she  had a cognitive impairment … even though the question was never on the table. As a child, she had a tumour the size of an orange removed from her pelvis in 2011. She still has an impairment to her leg, but this never affected her cognitive abilities, neither as a child nor today. After taking a break due to illness, she retook her Premières exam: "I know what I can do, " she emphasises. The tests confirmed what Schuster already knew: she has no cognitive impairment.

But why were the cognitive tests necessary at all, she wonders. She had submitted several dossiers with assessments from doctors, all of which related to her leg, just like the request: "I really had the feeling that they just didn't look at anything, because then they would have known that I didn't have a mental disability, that it was only physical and that I could enter the primary labour market. But I still had to do these tests. I didn't like that, it was really derogatory."