Intellectual Disability Quotes

Through their intellectual disability or mental illiteracy, some cannot free themselves from the imprisonment of irrevocable idiocy and feel condemned to find gratifying compensation by extracting the vilest qualities from the deep quarters of their dark self. ("Ugly mug offense")

What would happen, they conjectured, if they simply went on assuming their children would do everything. Perhaps not quickly. Perhaps not by the book. But what if they simply erased those growth and development charts, with their precise, constricting points and curves? What if they kept their expectations but erased the time line? What harm could it do? Why not try?

How many graves has the government of Michigan set aside for the casualties of the water crisis that will end with a gunshot in fifteen years’ time? We all know how cops respond to kids of color with intellectual disabilities or mental illness.

Labeling a child’s mind as diseased—whether with autism, intellectual disabilities, or transgenderism—may reflect the discomfort that mind gives parents more than any discomfort it causes their child. Much gets corrected that might better have been left alone.

A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They're on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority's blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options – neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there's cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I'm easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I'll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome drugs.

But in today’s world, being seen as intellectually, cognitively, or developmentally disabled is dangerous because intelligence and verbal communication are entrenched markers of personhood.

Let me remind all of us--disabled and nondisabled--that every time we defend our intelligence, we come close to disowning intellectually disabled people. We imply that it might be okay to exclude, devalue, and institutionalize people who actually live with body-mind conditions that impact the ways they think, understand, and process information. The only way out of this trap is to move toward, not away from, intellectually disabled people, to practice active solidarity.

What we need to make a more decent society is not a few Splendid Samaritans but millions of Minimally Decent Samaritans.

The Supreme Court had banned the execution of people with intellectual disability, but states like Alabama refused to assess in any honest way whether the condemned are disabled.

But she was actually Isla Jordan, a vulnerable young woman with an intellectual disability. All this time, Elliot had convinced himself – and Isla – that she was Andie

The reality that the (intellectually disabled) person is a version of myself is one from which so much can be learned and gained, and yet, it is a reality which most people deny and try to escape from.

I’m an occupational therapist, an obscure profession if there ever was one. We are few and far between, maybe because we have chosen to serve people with disabilities. All disabilities. Not a glamorous endeavour, nor a lucrative one. And I say serve because we deem that in helping we see weakness, while in serving we see wholeness. We’ve opted for wholeness nearly a century ago and have been at odds with the system ever since. We don’t fix people, you see: with them, we simply try to find a way to meaning, balance, and justice. I chose occupational therapy because it blends science and humanism, intellectual rigour and compassion.

The more the world commits to programs for poverty and education, the greater the gap for those with intellectual disabilities. That’s because money goes where results are quick and quantifiable, which is not likely for people with intellectual disabilities.

This intellectual disability “rendered him blindly impervious, not merely to human character but also to shades of difference. He possessed no gift for differentiation, no capacity for adjustment to circumstances. It was his spiritual and mental rigidity that proved his undoing.”38

The most famous victim of the surgery is probably JFK’s intellectually disabled sister, Rosemary Kennedy: subjected to a prefrontal lobotomy at twenty-three in an attempt to calm her emotional outbursts, she spent the remaining sixty years of her life institutionalized, reduced to the mental capacity of a toddler.

The busybody (banned as sexist, demeaning to older women) who lives next door called my daughter a tomboy (banned as sexist) when she climbed the jungle (banned; replaced with "rain forest") gym. Then she had the nerve to call her an egghead and a bookworm (both banned as offensive; replaced with "intellectual") because she read fairy (banned because suggests homosexuality; replace with "elf") tales. I'm tired of the Language Police turning a deaf ear (banned as handicapism) to my complaints. I'm no Pollyanna (banned as sexist) and will not accept any lame (banned as offensive; replace with "walks with a cane") excuses at this time. If Alanis Morrissette can play God (banned) in Dogma (banned as ethnocentric; replace with "Doctrine" or "Belief"), why can't my daughter play stickball (banned as regional or ethnic bias) on boy's night out (banned as sexist)? Why can't she build a snowman (banned, replace with "snow person") without that fanatic (banned as ethnocentric; replace with "believer," "follower," or "adherent") next door telling her she's going to hell (banned; replaced with "heck" or "darn")? Do you really think this is what the Founding Fathers (banned as sexist; replace with "the Founders" or "the Framers") had in mind? That we can't even enjoy our Devil (banned)-ed ham sandwiches in peace? I say put a stop to this cult (banned as ethnocentric) of PC old wives' tales (banned as sexist; replace with "folk wisdom") and extremist (banned as ethnocentric; replace with "believer," "follower," or "adherent") conservative duffers (banned as demeaning to older men). As an heiress (banned as sexist; replace with "heir") to the first amendment, I feel that only a heretic (use with caution when comparing religions) would try to stop American vernacular from flourishing in all its inspirational (banned as patronizing when referring to a person with disabilities) splendor.

Intellectual Property must be accessible to facilitate full and equal enjoyment of innovation and creativity by all.

The Supreme Court had banned the execution of people with intellectual disability, but states like Alabama refused to assess in any honest way whether the condemned are disabled. We’re supposed to sentence people fairly after fully considering their life circumstances, but instead we exploit the inability of the poor to get the legal assistance they need—all so we can kill them with less resistance.

How did I ever learn that people like my daughter were less-than? Had the roots of my thinking been planted by the defect language, by the bad seed and at zero language? Had they begun in the hallways of that elementary school I attended? Not quite. The roots of my thinking were older than me. They were older than the neglected buildings that housed people with intellectual disabilities, older than the American laws requiring their sterilization. The roots dug deep into history’s soil, reaching even past the story of Jesus’s disciples, who found a blind man on the side of a road and asked their master, “Who sinned to make this man blind? The man or his parents?” Disability as punishment . Disability as sin. Disability as problem, as outcast, as other. These equations have been graffitied all over human history.

Instead of concentrating on how we can include the “other,” too often in American Christianity the focus becomes on when, how, and finding the right justifications for excluding the “other.” When I truly begin to appreciate the inclusive nature of Jesus, my heart laments at all the exclusiveness I see and experience. I think of my female friends; women of wisdom, peace, discernment, and character who should be emulated by the rest of us. When I listen and learn from these women, I realize what an amazing leaders they would be in church—but many never will be leaders in that way because they are lacking one thing: male genitals. Wise and godly women have been excluded, not because of a lack of gifting, education, or ability, but because they were born with the wrong private parts. I also think of a man who attended my former church who has an intellectual disability. He was friendly, faithful, and could always be counted on for a good laugh because he had absolutely no filter— yelling out at least six times during each sermon. One time in church my daughter quietly leaned over to tell me she had to go to the bathroom—and, in true form so that everyone heard, he shouted out, “Hey! Pipe it down back there!” It was hilarious. However, our friend has been asked to leave several churches because of his “disruptiveness.” Instead of being loved and embraced for who he is, he has been repeatedly excluded from the people of God because of a disability. We find plenty of other reasons to exclude people. We exclude because people have been divorced, exclude them for not signing on to our 18-page statements of faith, exclude them because of their mode of baptism, exclude them because of their sexual orientation, exclude them for rejecting predestination…we have become a religious culture focused on exclusion of the “other,” instead of following the example of Jesus that focuses on finding ways for the radical inclusion of the “other.” Every day I drive by churches that proudly have “All Are Welcome” plastered across their signs; however, I rarely believe it—and I don’t think others believe it either. Far too often, instead of church being something that exists for the “other,” church becomes something that exists for the “like us” and the “willing to become like us.” And so, Christianity in America is dying.

During Rosemary’s childhood, the distinction between the intellectually disabled and the mentally ill was rarely made. Instead, according to psychological definitions of the day, “idiots” were the most severely disabled, classified as those with the intellectual capacity of a two-year-old or younger; “imbeciles” as those with a three- to eight-year-old mental capacity; and “morons” as those with an eight- to twelve-year-old capacity. These labels limited society’s understanding of people with intellectual and physical disabilities, and lacked nuanced interpretation of the causes and conditions of various disabilities, including the many types of simple and complex learning disorders.

The stupendous quarrel, the perpetual emergency, the monumental unhappiness, the battered pride, the intoxication of resistance had rendered him incapable of even nibbling at the truth, however intelligent he still happened to be. By the time his ideas wormed their way through all that emotion, they had been so distorted and intensified as only barely to resemble human thought. Despite the unremitting determination to comprehend the enemy, as though in understanding them there was still, for him, some hope, despite the thin veneer of professorial brilliance, which gave even his most dubious and bungled ideas a certain intellectual gloss, now at the core of everything was hatred and the great disabling fantasy of revenge.

TCA pretends to be about raising money for charity. That’s true, but only so far. If I had not taken time off from the Penn & Teller show to do The Celebrity Apprentice—if Teller and I had just done our show, gotten usual pay—I could have donated four times the amount of money that Trump had pledged to give my charity if I won the whole damn shooting match. Opportunity Village, “my” charity that helps intellectually disabled adults to enter society, got a lot of attention because I was on The Celebrity Apprentice, and that does count for something. And when I was “fired,” my real bosses at Caesars, who own the Rio and the Penn & Teller Theater, said, “Oh, you wanted a quarter million for Opportunity Village? We don’t have to do some jive TV show; we’ll just write a check.” They wrote the full winning amount to Opportunity Village and everyone was happy.

The crime was discovered when Trina became pregnant. As is often the case, the correctional officer was fired but not criminally prosecuted. Trina remained imprisoned and gave birth to a son. Like hundreds of women who give birth while in prison, Trina was completely unprepared for the stress of childbirth. She delivered her baby while handcuffed to a bed. It wasn’t until 2008 that most states abandoned the practice of shackling or handcuffing incarcerated women during delivery. Trina’s baby boy was taken away from her and placed in foster care. After this series of events—the fire, the imprisonment, the rape, the traumatic birth, and then the seizure of her son—Trina’s mental health deteriorated further. Over the years, she became less functional and more mentally disabled. Her body began to spasm and quiver uncontrollably, until she required a cane and then a wheelchair. By the time she had turned thirty, prison doctors diagnosed her with multiple sclerosis, intellectual disability, and mental illness related to trauma. Trina had filed a civil suit against the officer who raped her, and the jury awarded her a judgment of $62,000. The guard appealed, and the Court reversed the verdict because the correctional officer had not been permitted to tell the jury that Trina was in prison for murder. Consequently, Trina never received any financial aid or services from the state to compensate her for being violently raped by one of its “correctional” officers. In 2014, Trina turned fifty-two. She has been in prison for thirty-eight years. She is one of nearly five hundred people in Pennsylvania who have been condemned to mandatory life imprisonment without parole for crimes they were accused of committing when they were between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. It is the largest population of child offenders condemned to die in prison in any single jurisdiction in the world.

Consequently, we now have Social Justice texts—forming a kind of Gospel of Social Justice—that express, with absolute certainty, that all white people are racist, all men are sexist, racism and sexism are systems that can exist and oppress absent even a single person with racist or sexist intentions or beliefs (in the usual sense of the terms), sex is not biological and exists on a spectrum, language can be literal violence, denial of gender identity is killing people, the wish to remedy disability and obesity is hateful, and everything needs to be decolonized. That is the reification of the postmodern political principle. This approach distrusts categories and boundaries and seeks to blur them, and is intensely focused on language as a means of creating and perpetuating power imbalances. It exhibits a deep cultural relativism, focuses on marginalized groups, and has little time for universal principles or individual intellectual diversity.

A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They’re on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority’s blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options—neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr. Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there’s cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I’m easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I’ll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome dogs.

When we decide what community is worthy of epistemic trust, we are implicitly also deciding what it means to know something. Reflecting on Donald Trump’s historical mishmash of a statement that Andrew Jackson was angry about the Civil War (which began sixteen years after Jackson’s death), George Will dissected the president’s words to underscore the essential character of his thought. It is not that Trump suffers the disability of an untrained mind tied to “stratospheric self-confidence,” Will wrote, or that he is intellectually slothful and misinformed or totally ignorant of ordinary matters of history and of the fact that he has no knowledge of that about which he speaks, or that he is indifferent to being bereft of information. It is not that he is cognitively impaired. “The problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.” This is dangerous in a president, Will observes, for it “leaves him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind.”1 And when that mind demands that its reality be accepted as how things are, we are embattled by an assault on our sense of what it means to know something.

When a high IQ-test score is accompanied by subpar performance in some other domain, this is thought "surprising," and a new disability category is coined to name the surprise. So, similarly, the diagnostic criterion for mathematics disorder (sometimes termed dyscalculia) in DSM IV is that "Mathematical ability that falls substantially below that expected for the individual's chronological age, measured intelligence, and age-appropriate education" (p. 50)- The logic of discrepancy-based classification based on IQ-test performance has created a clear precedent whereby we are almost obligated to create a new disability category when an important skill domain is found to be somewhat dissociated from intelligence. It is just this logic that I exploited in creating a new category of disability- dysrationalia.T he proposed definition of the disability was as follows: Dysrationalia is the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence. It is a general term that refers to a heterogeneous group of disorders manifested by significant difficulties in belief formation, in the assessment of belief consistency, and/or in the determination of action to achieve one's goals. Although dysrationalia may occur concomitantly with other handicapping conditions (e.g., sensory impairment), dysrationalia is not the result of those conditions. The key diagnostic criterion for dysrationalia is a level of rationality, as demonstrated in thinking and behavior, that is significantly below the level of the individual's intellectual capacity (as determined by an individually administered IQ test).

The intellectual justification for transphobia on the left is usually framed as concern about a mythological 'trans ideology', which is individualist, bourgeois and unconcerned with class struggle. As we've seen, however, the majority of trans people are working class, and the oppression of trans people is specifically rooted in capitalism. In short, capitalism across the world still relies heavily on the idea of different categories of men's work and women's work, in which "women's work" (such as housework, child-rearing, and emotional labour) is either poorly paid or not paid at all. In order for this categorization to function, it needs to rest on a clear idea of how to divide men and women. Capitalism also requires a certain level of unemployment to function. If there were enough work to go round, no worker would worry about losing their job, and all workers could demand higher wages and better conditions. The ever-present spectre of unemployment, on the other hand, enables employers to dictate conditions. Equally, in terms of severe crisis this 'reserve army' of unemployed people can be called into employment as and when the economy requires it. This system of deliberate unemployment needs ways to mark who will work and who will be left unemployed. In our society this is principally achieved through race, class, gender, and disability. Social exclusion and revulsion at the existence of trans people usefully provides another class of people more likely to be left in the ranks of the unemployed (even more so if they are trans and poor, black, or disabled - which is why unemployment is highest among these trans people).

I struggle with an embarrassing affliction, one that as far as I know doesn’t have a website or support group despite its disabling effects on the lives of those of us who’ve somehow contracted it. I can’t remember exactly when I started noticing the symptoms—it’s just one of those things you learn to live with, I guess. You make adjustments. You hope people don’t notice. The irony, obviously, is having gone into a line of work in which this particular infirmity is most likely to stand out, like being a gimpy tango instructor or an acrophobic flight attendant. The affliction I’m speaking of is moral relativism, and you can imagine the catastrophic effects on a critic’s career if the thing were left to run its course unfettered or I had to rely on my own inner compass alone. To be honest, calling it moral relativism may dignify it too much; it’s more like moral wishy-washiness. Critics are supposed to have deeply felt moral outrage about things, be ready to pronounce on or condemn other people’s foibles and failures at a moment’s notice whenever an editor emails requesting twelve hundred words by the day after tomorrow. The severity of your condemnation is the measure of your intellectual seriousness (especially when it comes to other people’s literary or aesthetic failures, which, for our best critics, register as nothing short of moral turpitude in itself). That’s how critics make their reputations: having take-no-prisoners convictions and expressing them in brutal mots justes. You’d better be right there with that verdict or you’d better just shut the fuck up. But when it comes to moral turpitude and ethical lapses (which happen to be subjects I’ve written on frequently, perversely drawn to the topics likely to expose me at my most irresolute)—it’s like I’m shooting outrage blanks. There I sit, fingers poised on keyboard, one part of me (the ambitious, careerist part) itching to strike, but in my truest soul limply equivocal, particularly when it comes to the many lapses I suspect I’m capable of committing myself, from bad prose to adultery. Every once in a while I succeed in landing a feeble blow or two, but for the most part it’s the limp equivocator who rules the roost—contextualizing, identifying, dithering. And here’s another confession while I’m at it—wow, it feels good to finally come clean about it all. It’s that … once in a while, when I’m feeling especially jellylike, I’ve found myself loitering on the Internet in hopes of—this is embarrassing—cadging a bit of other people’s moral outrage (not exactly in short supply online) concerning whatever subject I’m supposed to be addressing. Sometimes you just need a little shot in the arm, you know? It’s not like I’d crib anyone’s actual sentences (though frankly I have a tough time getting as worked up about plagiarism as other people seem to get—that’s how deep this horrible affliction runs). No, it’s the tranquillity of their moral authority I’m hoping will rub off on me. I confess to having a bit of an online “thing,” for this reason, about New Republic editor-columnist Leon Wieseltier—as everyone knows, one of our leading critical voices and always in high dudgeon about something or other: never fearing to lambaste anyone no matter how far beneath him in the pecking order, never fearing for a moment, when he calls someone out for being preening or self-congratulatory, as he frequently does, that it might be true of himself as well. When I’m in the depths of soft-heartedness, a little dose of Leon is all I need to feel like clambering back on the horse of critical judgment and denouncing someone for something.

Grandiosity results from the human will becoming disabled. The will is disabled primarily through the shaming of the emotions. The shamed and blocked emotions stop the full integration of intellectual meaning. When an emotional event happens, emotions must be discharged in order for the intellect, reason and judgment to make sense out of it. Emotions are a form of thinking, and blocked emotions bias thinking. As emotions get bound by shame, their energy is frozen, which blocks the full interaction between the mind and the will.

Around the same time that index was released, Nicholas Kristof (again, a hero to many liberals), wrote a column that addressed the dependency on government programs.5 He focused on Kentucky’s Appalachian area, where people have yanked their kids out of literacy classes because if those kids learn to read, the parents will be less likely to qualify for a monthly SSI check for having kids with intellectual disabilities. We are not even making this up. Apparently, many of these people receive nearly $700 each month from Supplemental Security Income for those “disabled” children, and they receive those payments until their kids turn eighteen. And when the kids do turn eighteen, they are illiterate and unproductive because of their parents, and they collect SSI income as adults, many of them never holding a job in their entire lives. This is how our entitlement programs “help.” Nice, huh? Kristof wrote, “This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.

I’ve written about unconscious bias before, and I encourage you to test yourself at implicit.harvard.edu. It’s sobering to discover that whatever you believe intellectually, you’re biased about race, gender, age or disability.

idiots' were the most severely disabled, classified as those with the intellectual capacity of a two-year-old or younger; 'imbeciles' as those with a three- to eight-year-old mental capacity; and 'morons' as those with and eight- to twelve-year-old capacity. These labels limited society’s understanding of people with intellectual and physical disabilities.

Freeman and a handful of colleagues around the world were convinced that lobotomies were the much-longed-for cure for deep depression, mental illness, and violent, erratic, and hyperactive behavior. But the procedure was never meant to be used on intellectually disabled individuals.

At that time the Roman Catholic Church routinely refused the sacraments of Holy Communion and Confirmation to intellectually disabled children, especially those with Down syndrome.

The will is disabled primarily through the shaming of the emotions. The shamed and blocked emotions stop the full integration of intellectual meaning. When an emotional event happens, emotions must be discharged in order for the intellect, reason and judgment to make sense out of it. Emotions are a form of thinking, and blocked emotions bias thinking. As emotions get bound by shame, their energy is frozen, which blocks the full interaction between the mind and the will. The human will is intensity of desire raised to the level of action. The will is an appetite. It is dependent on the mind (reasoning and judgment) for its eyes. Without the mind, the will is blind and has no content. Without content the will starts willing itself. This state of disablement causes severe problems, some of which are: 1. The will wills what can’t be willed. 2. The will tries to control everything. 3. The will experiences itself as omnipotent or, when it has failed, as “wormlike.” 4. The will wills for the sake of willing (impulsiveness). 5. The will wills in absolute extremes—all or nothing.

I am income poor and intellectually wealthy.

In 1950 Koprowski tested his vaccine on intellectually disabled children at Letchworth Village in Thiells, New York, an institution where “naked residents, unkempt and dirty, huddled in sterile dayrooms.”25 His use of people with mental disorders was not without precedent. During the war, under the sponsorship of the U.S. government, leading researchers had infected psychotic residents at an Illinois state hospital with malaria to test the effectiveness of experimental drugs.26 They had also tested trial influenza vaccines by requiring intellectually disabled people to breathe in influenza virus through aviation masks or to inhale a nebulized spray into their nostrils for four minutes; both vaccinated people and unvaccinated controls were forced to breathe in the virus.27 One of the leaders of these experiments was the young Jonas Salk.

The attempt to create a total cultural environment and to silence or intimidate opponents is part of a campaign that had once seemed promising, even to those—yourself included—alarmed at the irrationality and anti-intellectuality unleashed by many of the most vocal proponents of the new fundamentalism. But concepts with some genuine merit—like “privilege,” “appropriation,” and even “microaggression”—were very rapidly weaponized, and well-intentioned discussions of “identity,” “inequality,” and “disability” became the leading edge of new efforts to label and separate the saved and the damned, the “woke” and the benighted, the victim and the oppressor. Concepts useful in careful and nuanced discussions proved strikingly “amenable to over-extension,” as the cultural historian Rochelle Gurstein put it, and ideas suitable for addressing “psychological distress” were forced into the service of efforts to “[redress] the subordination of one people by another,” yielding not significant redress but a new wave of puritanism and a culture of suspicion

If we are honest, typically we are less accepting of unique behaviors or diverse expressions of praise in a worship service than we ought to be. When a person with an intellectual disability sings loudly and off-key, is that a disruption or an expression of adoration? When an individual with obsessive behaviors cannot stop repetitively whispering, is that just cause for asking them to leave the sanctuary? The human soul was designed to worship.

The instrumental defence of speciesism invokes the widely used ‘slippery slope’ argument. The claim is that a first step in a certain direction will put us on a slippery slope, and we shall not be able to stop sliding into a moral abyss. In the present context, the argument is used to suggest that we need a clear line to divide those beings we can experiment on, or fatten for dinner, from those we cannot. The species boundary makes a nice sharp dividing line, whereas levels of self-awareness, autonomy or sentience do not. Once we allow that any human being, no matter how profoundly intellectually disabled, has no higher moral status than an animal, the argument goes, we have begun to slide down a slope, the next level of which is denying rights to social misfits, and the bottom of which is classifying anyone we do not like as sub-human and eliminating them.

It is because of this notion [of species essence] that we demand that a severely brain-damaged person should have the same rights as a university professor, or a physically disabled person the same rights as an Olympian sportsman. They are all 'human', whatever their intellectual and physical abilities.

To be ignorant is to be in the dark; to be wise is to be in the light. An illiterate person is disabled intellectually; an unenlightened person is handicapped spiritually.

At that time the Roman Catholic Church routinely refused the sacraments of Holy Communion and Confirmation to intellectually disabled children, especially those with Down syndrome. Even today some local churches still refuse the sacrament to those with intellectual impairments, in spite of a directive from the church during the latter part of the twentieth century that clergy should offer the sacraments to them.

The other consequence of the hegemony of biopsychiatry is the hierarchy of disability it created. For psychiatry to become a legitimate profession, let alone a science, a separation was created between those who can be treated (the “mentally ill”) and those labeled as incurable (feebleminded and then intellectually disabled).73 Another way to put this in context is that part of the easy acceptance of the hegemonic story of psychopharmaceuticals leading to deinstitutionalization is the underlying presumption that some form of social control of disability and abnormality is necessary.

Such intersectional analysis in the field of education, for example, repeatedly demonstrates the overrepresentation of students of color in special education and their labeling in “soft” disability categories such as emotionally disturbed, attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorders, and historically also “mental retardation” and now intellectual disability.89 As critical educators Dean Adams and Erica Meiners suggest, classification as special education masks segregation and pathologizes students of color.

Might it be logically inconsistent, for example, that we claim to value the lives of disabled people even as we create (and mandate) more and more prenatal tests to screen out “undesirable” fetuses? Glossing over these inconsistencies, or pretending that they can be easily and definitively resolved, simplifies the complexities inherent in questions of social justice. The desire for clear answers, free of contradiction and inconsistency, is understandable, but I want to suggest that accessible futures require such ambiguities. Following Puar, I believe that “contradictions and discrepancies…are not to be reconciled or synthesized but held together in tension. They are less a sign of wavering intellectual commitment than symptoms of the political impossibility to be on one side or the other.” Indeed, part of the problem I'm tracing in these pages is the assumption that there is only one side to the question of disability and that we're all already on it.

By the early 1800s, these prison/asylums in western Europe were, therefore, populated mostly by criminals, drunkards, heretics and the blasphemous, the unemployed, the homeless, and the physically handicapped, but only occasionally by the people we today would think of as having mental illnesses or intellectual disabilities. The only thing the residents had in common was that they didn’t work.

What promises can you make to a child about the world of possibility ahead of them when the state has poisoned their bloodstreams and bones such that their behavioral self-control and language comprehension are impaired? How many graves has the government of Michigan set aside for the casualties of the water crisis that will end with a gunshot in fifteen years’ time? We all know how cops respond to kids of color with intellectual disabilities or mental illness.

Deinstitutionalization has been largely defined as the movement of people with psychiatric and intellectual or developmental disabilities from state institutions and hospitals into community living and supports. Deinstitutionalization is also the accompanying closure of carceral locales, the shuttering of large, mostly state-sponsored/funded, institutions and hospitals for people with intellectual and psychiatric disabilities. But by understanding it as a history of (not only but also) abolitionist practices, I argue that deinstitutionalization is not only a historical process but a logic.

someone trained him to take these tests and to look a certain way on them. I can’t imagine the amount of time and attention it requires to do something like that. Why would anyone want to make him look intellectually disabled? And if they created his intellectual disability, did they create his autism too? What kind of a cruel person does that?

Accessibility Guidelines by the Indian IP Office is a commendable step towards full and equal participation of IP attorneys with disabilities.

Ableism is discrimination against people with disabilities. It is the harboring of beliefs that devalue and limit the potential of people with physical, intellectual, or mental disorders and disabilities. For instance, people might believe that autistic people will never be an asset to society, and that they need to be “fixed” or “cured".

Instead, according to psychological definitions of the day, “idiots” were the most severely disabled, classified as those with the intellectual capacity of a two-year-old or younger; “imbeciles” as those with a three- to eight-year-old mental capacity; and “morons” as those with an eight- to twelve-year-old capacity.

It is also important to note that not all pathological presentations are caused by the environment. A child may have underlying difficulties such as intellectual disabilities or other neurodevelopmental disorders. On the other hand, just because a child has survived unscathed does not mean that the environment was benign. We know that some children are naturally less sensitive to environmental influences and as such are more resilient to harsh environments.

I observe that I too must alter my vocabulary. No longer is it proper to say, as I have all my life, that someone “is mentally retarded.” As I discover on other websites, by using the new “People First Language,” one focuses on the person first, the disability last, as in “a woman who has mental retardation,” or “a man with mental retardation.” The analogy is that people with cancer have cancer, they are not cancer itself; the disability is only one aspect of who they are. In addition, with People First Language, one can avoid using the word “retarded,” which is too close to the familiar slur. In fact, some websites minimize the use of “mental retardation” by using as synonyms terms such as “developmental disability,” “intellectual disability,” and “cognitive disability.” As I scribble down this People First Language, I realize that many of my acquaintances might disparage such linguistic changes as mere nods to political correctness, and for a moment I do, too. But then I think, Look at how many cultural barriers Beth has had to deal with throughout her life—and how many physical barriers people with other disabilities experience: sidewalks without curb cuts, restrooms lacking accessible facilities, cabs that refuse guide dogs. Altering the way I speak is nothing compared to what she, and they, go through almost all day, almost every day. And it is such a simple way to help transform the cultural landscape that it seems arrogant and misguided to resist doing so.

With its promise of independence and autonomy, the Intellectual Property field is uniquely suited to persons with disabilities, providing a welcoming environment for people of different backgrounds to build a dignified and fulfilling career.

Discussion Questions 1. An institution for people with disabilities, the Willowbrook State School opened in 1947 on Staten Island, New York, and remained in operation until 1987. Despite having a maximum capacity of 4,000 people, by 1965 it housed over 6,000 intellectually and physically disabled children and adults, becoming the largest state-run mental institution of its kind in the United States. Due to staff and money shortages, there was only one nurse per ward, one or two attendants per 35 to 125 residents, and more than 200 residents living in houses built for fewer than 100. An estimated 12,000 residents died at Willowbrook from 1950 to 1980, approximately 400 a year, due to neglect, violence, lack of nutrition, and medical mismanagement or experimentation. What was your awareness of Willowbrook State School before reading The Lost Girls of

For persons with disabilities, the Intellectual Property profession is a gateway to independence, autonomy, and an inclusive work environment that respects and values individuals from all walks of life, offering a path to a respectable and sustainable livelihood.

The Intellectual Property profession is a perfect fit for persons with disabilities as it offers independence and autonomy, along with the chance to earn a respectable livelihood.

The Intellectual Property field provides great opportunities for persons with disabilities, providing the twin benefits of professional independence and the chance to thrive in a diverse and inclusive environment, leading to a dignified and rewarding career.

law's objective to fostering invention and creativity can only be achieved when IP systems are made fully accessible to everyone, especially individuals with disabilities.

Intellectual Property law's objective to foster invention and creativity can only be achieved when IP systems are made fully accessible to everyone, especially persons with disabilities.

Accessibility is a right, a right largely denied and disregarded in India.

The spirit of IP law, aimed at encouraging creative and inventive endeavors, can only be realized when the IP Office ensures complete accessibility for all, including persons with disabilities.

Because children of color are much more likely to be exposed to lead at a young age, it is devastating to think about what will happen to an entire generation of Flint children. What promises can you make to a child about the world of possibility ahead of them when the state has poisoned their bloodstreams and bones such that their behavioral self-control and language comprehension are impaired? How many graves has the government of Michigan set aside for the casualties of the water crisis that will end with a gunshot in fifteen years' time? We all know how cops respond to kids of color with intellectual disabilities or mental illness.

The objectives of IP law to advance creative and inventive pursuits will only be effectively served when the IP Office facilitates full accessibility for all, including persons with disabilities.

IP law's mission to stimulate creative and inventive activities will reach its full potential only when the Indian IP Office's systems are made entirely accessible to all, including persons with disabilities.

If genius springs from genetics, a meritocracy is hardly more just than the divine right of kings; it, too, mythologizes inherent superiority. If genius results from labor, then brilliant people deserve the kudos and wealth they reap. The communist perspective is that everyone can be a genius if he will only work at it; the fascist perspective is that born geniuses are a different species from the rest of humanity. Many people fall short of their potential through lack of discipline, but a visit to a coal mine will amply demonstrate that hard work on its own neither constitutes genius nor guarantees riches. The history of high intelligence is no less political than the history of intellectual disability or of mental illness.

You'd have to ask Leyla if you want to know more. She's a psychologist. One of a dozen on board. We don't just want our passengers to survive—we want them to be OK. We're dealing with a lot of trauma. So if you ever need to talk..." "I'll pass." "Bad experiences?" "Sort of." "What happened?" I shrug. "It took a long time to diagnose me." "From what I understand, autistic girls often don't run into trouble until a later age." I bark out a laugh. Oh, I ran into trouble, all right. I barely said a word between the ages of four and six. I hit three of my preschool and grade school teachers. In a class photo taken when I was seven, my face is covered in scratches from when I latched onto a particularly bad stim. Therapists and teachers labelled me as bipolar, as psychotic, as having oppositional defiant disorder, as intellectually disabled, and as just straight-up difficult, the same way Els did. One said all I needed was structure and a gluten-free diet. When I was nine, a therapist suggested I might be autistic, at which point I had already started to learn what set me off and how to mimic people; within two years, I was coping well enough to almost-but-not-quite blend in with my classmates. It's funny when people like Els have no idea anything is off about me, given that my parents spend half my childhood worrying I'd end up institutionalized. At the time, I thought the diagnosis was delayed because I was bad at being autistic, just like I was bad at everything else; it took me years to realize that since I wasn't only Black, but a Black girl, it's like the DSM shrank to a handful of options, and many psychologists were loath to even consider them.

Put another way, if you scored people a century ago against modern norms, they would have an average IQ score of 70—borderline for having an intellectual disability. If you scored people today against the norms of a century ago, we would have an average IQ score of 130—the typical cut score for mentally gifted programs.

The shamed and blocked emotions stop the full integration of intellectual meaning. When an emotional event happens, emotions must be discharged in order for the intellect, reason and judgment to make sense out of it. Emotions are a form of thinking, and blocked emotions bias thinking. As emotions get bound by shame, their energy is frozen, which blocks the full interaction between the mind and the will. The human will is intensity of desire raised to the level of action. The will is an appetite. It is dependent on the mind (reasoning and judgment) for its eyes. Without the mind, the will is blind and has no content. Without content the will starts willing itself. This state of disablement causes severe problems, some of which are: 1. The will wills what can’t be willed. 2. The will tries to control everything. 3. The will experiences itself as omnipotent or, when it has failed, as “wormlike.” 4. The will wills for the sake of willing (impulsiveness). 5. The will wills in absolute extremes—all or nothing.

The overturning of the pernicious dogma that our intelligence is unchangeable holds enormous implications for every level of society: young and old, rich and poor, genius and cognitively disabled alike. No one is saying that cognitive training can turn an intellectually disabled person into a genius.

That the spectrum is linear couldn’t be further from the truth. To get a more accurate perspective, I met Dr. Judith Gould at the Lorna Wing Centre for Autism. Judith is a chartered consultant clinical psychologist with more than forty years’ experience. She specializes in autism-spectrum disorders and learning disabilities. In the 1970s, with the late Dr. Lorna Wing, Judith came up with the term autism spectrum. Judith believes the key point to understand is that autism is a spectrum not because it is linear but because any factor can be present at any point. She said, “[In our study] we saw the classic autistic aloof person with repetitive rituals and elaborate routines. But we also saw children with aspects of social difficulties, communication difficulties, and imagination difficulties who didn’t fit in with [earlier] precise criteria. “These traits tended to be seen together, but you could have anything on the dimension: anything on the communication dimension, anything on the imagination dimension, and so on. At first we called it the autism continuum. Continuum implied severity from high to low, but that’s not what we meant. The spectrum would look like a rainbow because anything can happen at any point. The colors merge. “In terms of communication, people can come anywhere on the spectrum. There are those who only communicate their needs, and there are those who don’t realize the person they are with may be getting bored when they talk about special interests. Then you’ve got those with a highly intellectual, formal, little-professor communication style.

anthologies like Accessing the Future (gathering together voices of disabled people to create SF tales of disability), The Sum of Us (an anthology complicating ideas of care and caregiving), Alison Sinclair’s Darkborn series (presenting the social changes that would occur in a world where half the population is blind), Tanya Huff’s novel Gate of Darkness, Circle of Light (which features a protagonist with an intellectual disability who resists containment or control), Ada Hoffmann’s short story “You Have To Follow the Rules” (which transports the reader into a world where autism is the norm and asks us to reconsider how we codify rules of social interaction and privilege neurotypicality),

Yet for those people born onto the autistic spectrum, this unedited, unfiltered and scary-as-all-hell reality is home. The functions that genetics bestows on the rest of us—the “editors”—as a birthright, people with autism must spend their lives learning how to simulate. It is an intellectual and emotional task of Herculean, Sisyphean and Titanic proportions, and if the autistic people who undertake it aren’t heroes, then I don’t know what heroism is, never mind that the heroes have no choice. Sentience itself is not so much a fact to be taken for granted, but a brick-by-brick, self-built construct requiring constant maintenance. As if this wasn’t a tall enough order, people with autism must survive in an outside world where “special needs” is playground slang for “retarded,” where meltdowns and panic attacks are viewed as tantrums, where disability allowance claimants are assumed by many to be welfare scroungers, and where British foreign policy can be described as “autistic” by a French minister. (M.

awareness of one's being-toward-disability (to transpose a Heideggerian turn of phrase) may provide the impetus to critically examine one's personal relationship to the possibility of disability and the meaning of disability in a broader social context. This can translate into the idea that "we are all disabled somehow," and lead to a call to abandon the us/them dichotomy that defines so many discussions of intellectual disability.

Prophetlike, the retarded only remind us of the insecurity hidden in our false sense of self-possession.

I fear that the stress on independence reinstates Sesha as less than fully human. With every embrace, I know her humanity."63

You can do anything you stick your mind to. Einstein was dyslexic, Bill Gates has asperger's syndrome, Orlando Bloom also has dyslexia, and Daniel Radcliffe has dyspraxia and (LD), but they all went on to become very successful individuals in this world. I myself have an intellectual disability, but I refuse to let that garbage set me back. You just gotta stay positive, let the critics and sarcasm roll off your back and just keep grinding nowhere but forward. You don't have to be smart to crush your dreams, you just have to have the heart and determination.

If I were physically dependent—paralyzed or disabled or limited in some physical way—I would need you to help me. If I were emotionally dependent, my sense of worth and security would come from your opinion of me. If you didn’t like me, it could be devastating. If I were intellectually dependent, I would count on you to do my thinking for me, to think through the issues and problems of my life.

If I were physically dependent—paralyzed or disabled or limited in some physical way—I would need you to help me. If I were emotionally dependent, my sense of worth and security would come from your opinion of me. If you didn’t like me, it could be devastating. If I were intellectually dependent, I would count on you to do my thinking for me, to think through the issues and problems of my life. If I were independent, physically, I could pretty well make it on my own. Mentally, I could think my own thoughts, I could move from one level of abstraction to another. I could think creatively and analytically and organize and express my thoughts in understandable ways. Emotionally, I would be validated from within. I would be inner directed. My sense of worth would not be a function of being liked or treated well. It’s easy to see that independence is much more mature than dependence. Independence is a major achievement in and of itself. But independence is not supreme.

More recently, autism has been seen by some as a neurological difference and not necessarily a disorder at all. According to the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN 2022, About Autism section): Autism is a developmental disability [which is a natural part of human diversity] that affects how we experience the world around us. Autistic people are an important part of the world. Autism is a normal part of life, and makes us who we are… Autistic people are born autistic and we will be autistic our whole lives… There is no one way to be autistic. Some autistic people can speak, and some autistic people need to communicate in other ways. Some autistic people also have intellectual disabilities and some autistic people don’t. Some autistic people need a lot of help in their day-to-day lives, and some autistic people only need a little help. All of these people are autistic, because there is no right or wrong way to be autistic. All of us experience autism differently, but we all contribute to the world in meaningful ways. We all deserve understanding and acceptance.