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Movies and television reflect our lives, but when they don’t show all of us — or worse, cast other people to play a particular group — it strengthens stereotype and discrimination. In my latest column for HealthCentral, I dive into disability in the movies and add a list of my favourites:

“When I watch movies and TV, I see no one like me—a woman with a disability living her life. In popular culture, disability and chronic illness are almost nonexistent, trotted out to serve only a handful of storylines. These narratives include inspirational overcoming, as in finally walking again while a crescendo of violins makes the audience cry. Or there are those stories of tragic victims who, unable to face life in a wheelchair, die by the end of the movie usually while facilitating the growth of the able-bodied characters. One such tragic-victim story is the Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby, which I can only describe as disability death porn.

When you are a real person who is living relatively well with chronic conditions and disability, this is both infuriating and exhausting. But it doesn’t stop there.

I have a handy test to measure whether an event or situation is discrimination. Swap out your group of choice—say, disability—with any other minority group. If the result is uncomfortable or cringe-inducing, you have just encountered discrimination. Case in point: No studio would ever claim today that it was too expensive or too time-consuming to cast a Black actor to play a Black character. (Whether they’re casting people of color as often as they could in other roles clearly remains to be seen.) And yet, we see this argument over and over again when it comes to casting actors with disabilities. Not only does Hollywood deem it acceptable to cast able-bodied actors instead, but it’s often the quickest way to earn awards, including the coveted Oscar.”

Read the rest of my column on disability in the movies on HealthCentral.