Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Given the increased emphasis on understanding the support needs of people with intellectual disability are the traditional labels of mild, moderate and severe intellectual disability still relevant?

 

 

According to operational definition, intellectual disability is distinguished by notable limitations that exit in both intellectual functioning and adaptive behavior that are conveyed through adaptive skills of conceptual, social and practical domains. On the other hand, constitutively intellectual disability is defined as the general raise of the disability or the manner of limitations in the functioning of the individual that claims a substantial disadvantage to the individual inside the social context. This term of intellectual disability is used by American association on intellectual and development disabilities and the Diagnostic and statistical manual and International classification of diseases that states (Schalock & Luckasson, 2013).With the increasing supports and needs that is provided hugely to the disabled individuals it is seen that depending on the intensity of the disabilities the help is given. Therefore, thought the classification today of intellectual disability is relevant but it is not totally depending on mild, moderate, severe and profound classifications.

Intellectually disabled child is often the object of curiosity and concern for their parents, family that what has causes this to their child, and how can they help their disabled child. The causes that are usually considered important are the prenatal, perinatal and postnatal time of occurrence that had major effects on the baby (Foreman, 2009). Thus, today to classify the intellectually disabled it is very important to have applicable information. Relevant information about the individual can be gathered through the history of the person including his prior evaluations, reports, receipts of services and their present living and working surroundings and the information that is acquired from the measures of broadly based assessment (Schalock & Luckasson, 2015).

The concept of support and need is common resources that everyone needs to enhance our functioning. In case of disable peoples only the intensity of both support and needs changes. The overall support needs that can be identified are into four ways that are the normative, felt, comparative and expressed needs. The support need actually contemplate the limitation in the functioning of the humans as an outcome of personal capacity or the context in which the individual is functioning. As stated in the human performance technology (HPT), the human performance is affected by the seven components those are the organizational system, incentives, cognitive supports, tools, physical environments, skill-knowledge and the inherent ability (Thompson et al., 2009).

Other comparable bands that are available presently for adaptive levels of behavior keeping in mind the components of the framework that are the intellectual abilities, adaptive behavior, health, participation, context and the supports needs. These frameworks has their individual elements for classification like ranges of IQ, adaptive levels of behavior, health status, levels in participation, personal or surrounding facilitators or inhibitors  and the intensity of the supports needs respectively. However, the area of intellectual disability is having changes regarding its nomenclature and so this model of human functioning is taking a different route to classify the severity of the conditions (Schalock & Luckasson, 2015). It can further be said that classification today that is related to more than just IQ and have enlarged its field to the individuals functional level, their supports needs, health care, level of funding, predictors of the results. Thus, the competency for which the answer lays that it purely in the clinical judgment levels, broad knowledge and interactions with intellectual disabled persons and mainly the use of the enlarged classification domains and the thinking skill on the part of the classifier (Schalock & Luckasson, 2013).

References

Foreman, P. (2009). Education of students with an intellectual disability: Research and practice. IAP.

Schalock, R. L., & Luckasson, R. (2013). What's at stake in the lives of people with intellectual disability? Part I: The power of naming, defining, diagnosing, classifying, and planning supports. Intellectual and developmental disabilities, 51(2), 86-93.

Schalock, R. L., & Luckasson, R. (2015). A systematic approach to subgroup classification in intellectual disability. Intellectual and developmental disabilities, 53(5), 358-366.

Thompson, J. R., Bradley, V. J., Buntinx, W. H., Schalock, R. L., Shogren, K. A., Snell, M. E., ... & Gomez, S. C. (2009). Conceptualizing supports and the support needs of people with intellectual disability. Intellectual and developmental disabilities, 47(2), 135-146.