Giving a Name, and Dignity, to a Disability – The New York Times

Interesting account of the evolution of terms for those with intellectual disabilities:

OTHER organizations and state agencies have done the same, most of them joining the medical and scientific communities in adopting the term now in favor: intellectual disability.

Dr. Wehmeyer said the change made an important break from the connotations of past terminology. “It’s the first term that doesn’t refer to the condition as a defective mental process — slow, weak, feeble,” he said. “Intellectual disability conveys that it is not a problem within a person, but a lack of fit between that person’s capacities and the demands of the environment in which the person is functioning.”

But even Dr. Wehmeyer did not immediately care for the term (“I would have gone with cognitive disability,” he said). And not everyone embraces what is called people-first language — as in “people with intellectual disability.” Advocates in the blind and deaf communities, for example, argue that such constructions are unnecessarily defensive and hinting of shame.

The question now is whether “intellectual disability” will remain the preference, or, like its predecessors, devolve into a derogatory taunt. The answer seems to hinge on society’s ability to shed its prejudices and move past that stigmatizing sense of otherness.

One of the men I wrote about, Keith Brown, lived for many years in Texas institutions before working for more than three decades in that turkey-processing plant in Iowa. His job was to “pull crop” — that is, to yank out part of the digestive systems of dead birds swinging past on shackles.

When he and the other men were finally removed from their squalid schoolhouse dormitory in 2009, after repeated failures of government officials to heed warnings, Mr. Brown was found to have suffered significant physical and emotional consequences, including post-traumatic stress.

Today he is the sole resident of an apartment in Arkansas. He is a commuter, a palette-jack operator, a pet owner, a Dr Pepper drinker, a brother, an uncle. He is many things, he says, “but I am not retarded.”

Source: Giving a Name, and Dignity, to a Disability – The New York Times