Who am I?

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     Hi!  I'm Nina Slota.  I spent my career as a research, developmental health psychologist who has had RSD since 2005. 

 

What does that mean?

     I'm not a therapist.  Instead, I taught college and conducted psych research about RSD/CRPS.  I'm interested in people's experiences, their identities, and ways of coping.

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My health history, in brief

     I was diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease when I was 9.  This is part of what lead me to health psychology.  I developed other chronic conditions in my teens and twenties.  My RSD was as a result of a pedestrian accident in 2005; a car tire ended up on my left foot.  My RSD is in my left leg; it hasn't spread.  In 2014, I was diagnosed with cancer, and 2015 brought a diagnosis of lymphedema.   

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My Passion

      During my twenties when I was learning to deal with my health impairments, I found an academic area called disability studies.  It brings together professors from English, history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy, among other fields.  It studies how disability shapes individuals' lives and how disability is portrayed in cultures around the world.  The academic conferences bring together academics, artists, and activists, most of whom have some type of disability, to study and question the cultural assumptions that life with disability is somehow less than life without a disability.  Disability studies doesn't say that there aren't challenges and bad days; it does say that one should be proud of functioning, even if that's just getting out of bed or keeping busy while in bed.  

       Even before my RSD, I needed to hear this message.  I fell in love with the field.  I would often integrate short explanations of disability studies into some of my courses, and I occasionally got to teach a whole semester course that combined health psychology and disability studies.