PHILOSOPHERS OF INTELLECTUAL DISABILITY: A TAXONOMY

Abstract: This essay explores various roles that philosophers occupy in relation to intellectual disability. In examining how philosophers define their object of inquiry as experts and gatekeepers, it raises critical questions concerning the nature of philosophical discourse about intellectual disability. It then goes on to consider three alternate positions, the advocate or friend, the animal, and the "intellectually disabled," each of which points to new ways of philosophizing in the face of intellectual disability.     

INTELLECTUAL DISABILITY AND MYSTICAL UNKNOWING: CONTEMPORARY INSIGHTS FROM MEDIEVAL SOURCES

Intellectual disabilities make people vulnerable to marginalization in churches and social spaces, but theology has not sufficiently attended to the topic and promoted the flourishing of people who have cognitive impairments. This article responds to theology's inadequate attention to intellectual disability and historical resources for reflection on the topic by reading medieval sources with intellectual disability in mind. I argue that Bonaventure's Itinerarium Mentis in Deum provides a model for imagining intellectually disabled and nondisabled people sharing the journey into God and that Eckhart's view of intellect as the uncreated element in the soul includes people who are intellectually disabled among those who may be united with God.     

School-based care and support for the intellectually disabled learners at risk for sexual abuse: South African teacher carer perspectives

This study examined the functionality of a school-based care and support program for the intellectually disabled learners who have a history of sexual abuse. Participants were 28 teachers from four special educational needs schools in the Gauteng Province, South Africa (females = 80%; age range 30 to 55 years). The teachers participated in a focus group discussion on the extent to which the school-based care and support for learners with intellectual disability worked to the intended goals and procedures. Thematic analysis of the data suggested the school care and support program to work to purpose within the school system and with partner non-governmental organisations; but less so with the local school district personnel.     

In the public interest: intellectual disability, the Supreme Court, and the death penalty

This article deals with a case that recently came before the U.S. Supreme Court. The issues involved whether attorneys provided effective assistance to a person convicted of murder when no mitigating evidence was presented (either strategically or by neglect) to the jury concerning the intellectual disabilities of their client during the death penalty phase of the trial. The Supreme Court had previously ruled that the death penalty for intellectually disabled individuals (mentally retarded) constituted cruel and unusual punishment. In this case the attorneys made a strategic decision not to present possibly mitigating evidence for the death penalty phase. The Supreme Court considered whether the appeals court abdicated its judicial review responsibilities. The results of psychological evaluations are presented, and the decisions of the Supreme Court are discussed.     

Blockheads, roundheads, pointy heads: intellectual disability and the brain before modern medicine

Recent work on the conceptual history of intellectual disability has pointed to a discontinuity in the seventeenth century, identifying the concept as essentially modern in a more radical sense than mental illness or physical disability. However, Galenist accounts of intellectual impairment were clearly connected (via anatomy) to neurology, which could be taken as prima facie evidence that Galenism shares with modern medicine one of its basic explanatory approaches to intellectual disability. Close textual examination does not bear out this counter-claim, at least as far as the conceptual apparatus itself is concerned. However, it does reveal a degree of continuity in the medical mind-set as discourses of monstrosity were transposed from the domain of anatomy to that of post-Cartesian psychology.     

L. L. Thurstone: A new assessment

Most psychologists have heard of Thurstone, and know him as a pioneer of mathematical psychology and factor analysis. But his appearances in history books are rare and peripheral, as a man of technical prowess rather than intellectual achievement, and at best he is seen as a link in the tradition culminating in signal detection and mathematical learning theory. Nineteen eighty-seven is the centenary of his birth, so it is a timely moment to correct this picture. Thurstone was influenced by G. H. Mead, and his work is best placed within the pragmatist movement, not as moving towards the mechanistic psychology that now dominates psychology. Viewed in this way, his true status and the reasons for his relative neglect become apparent. This is illustrated by a detailed consideration of his mathematical learning models.     

Disability research in counseling psychology journals: a 20-year content analysis

We conducted an exploratory content analysis of disability research in 5 major counseling psychology journals between 1990 and 2010. The goal was to review the counseling psychology literature to better understand the prevalence of disability research, identify research methods most often conducted, and elucidate the types of concerns most studied. We searched 5 journals (Journal of Counseling & Development, Journal of Counseling Psychology, The Counseling Psychologist, Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, and Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology) using keywords derived from disability terms defined by the Individuals With Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 (IDEA). Articles were categorized by methodology and disability category examined. We found that disability research continues to comprise an extremely small amount (from less than 1% to 2.7%) of the counseling psychology literature, with the frequency of articles plateauing in recent years. The research design of articles published has changed, with an increased number of empirical articles and a decrease in literature reviews. We conclude by calling for increased empirical investigation of disability among journals specific to counseling psychology to recognize disability as an important aspect of diversity within the field.     

Surrogate medical decision making on behalf of a never-competent, profoundly intellectually disabled patient who is acutely ill

With the improvements in medical care and resultant increase in life expectancy of the intellectually disabled, it will become more common for healthcare providers to be confronted by ethical dilemmas in the care of this patient population. Many of the dilemmas will focus on what is in the best interest of patients who have never been able to express their wishes with regard to medical and end-of-life care and who should be empowered to exercise surrogate medical decision-making authority on their behalf. A case is presented that exemplifies the ethical and legal tensions surrounding surrogate medical decision making for acutely ill, never-competent, profoundly intellectually disabled patients.     

What survivors see: Creative condemnations of total institutionalization

This paper presents a 2013–2016 research project that documented the history of the Huronia Regional Centre from the perspectives of survivors. Located in Ontario Canada, Huronia housed children with intellectual disabilities until its closure in 2009, and is now notorious for its violent history. Our research collective visited Huronia in 2014 to take pictures of the space, and used those photographs in scrapbook art created in monthly workshops. This paper presents pages selected from survivors' scrapbooks to illustrate key spatial conditions and affective experiences of a total institution. Analysis of these images shows that models of institutionalization are designed to produce violence against the institutionalized. Given the collective's commitment to an arts-informed methodology, this paper serves as a clear condemnation of every version of institutionalization. First, this paper situates its argument in geographic and sociological research that has taken up Goffman's concept of the total institution. Next, it lays out a methodological approach that included photovoice adapted for intellectually disabled institutional survivors. Finally, it presents and analyzes key images of art that survivors produced with support in workshop settings—with a focus on photography taken in facility buildings and on facility grounds.     

Intellectual disability and the myth of the changeling myth

This article investigates the historical sources for the idea of the "changeling" or substitute child as an explanation for congenital intellectual disability. Pre-modern sources for this idea are elite and theological as much as popular and folkloric, nor do they refer to intellectual disability in any sense recognizable to us. Rather, both the concept of intellectual disability and the notion of a transhistorical changeling myth emerge from the historical core of modern psychology.     

Can disability studies and psychology join hands?

Although the field of disabilities studies incorporates psychology within its interdisciplinary purview, it embodies a distinct perspective consonant with the new paradigm of disability. This perspective is contrasted with that of psychology, and the place of disability within psychology is examined. Although psychology has begun to embrace diversity, disability has remained marginalized. Four areas are presented in this article: (a) the foundational ideas of disability studies, (b) training in disability within psychology, (c) the paradigms of disability reflected in research on disability, and (d) future research directions.     

Resilience: A Disability Studies and Community Psychology Approach

This paper contests traditional psychological understandings of resilience through reference to a research project exploring resilience in the lives of disabled people. The paper briefly historically locates individualistic accounts of resilience (which have often been unhelpful in the lives of disabled people) and then moves into more recent social constructionist theories of this phenomenon. This latter perspective necessarily locates resilience in a network of resources including material resources, relationships, identity, bodies and minds, power and control, community participation, community cohesion and social justice. We argue that the recognition of resilience as a relational product is important and in tune with attempts to make psychology less an individualistic encounter and more a community intervention. However, disabled people, their politics and the development of critical disability studies, contest and challenge normative ideas of what it means to live with a resilient network of resources. In this sense disability offers new and exciting ways of addressing resilience.     

自闭症和智力障碍儿童行为问题与父母焦虑的关系:育儿压力的中介作用与领悟社会支持的调节作用

为探讨自闭症和智力障碍儿童行为问题与其父母焦虑的关系及其内在作用机制,研究采用问卷法对1023名自闭症和智力障碍儿童父母进行调查。结果表明：(1)自闭症和智力障碍儿童行为问题对父母焦虑具有正向预测作用;(2)育儿压力在儿童行为问题和父母焦虑间起中介作用;(3)儿童行为问题与育儿压力的关系受到领悟社会支持水平的调节,调节作用只在智力障碍儿童父母群体中显著。研究结果有助于揭示自闭症和智力障碍儿童行为问题对父母焦虑的影响及作用机制,对改善自闭症和智力障碍儿童父母育儿压力与焦虑具有一定指导意义。     

Queer/Fear: Disability, Sexuality, and The Other

This paper examines the relationship between disability and “queerness.” I argue that the hostility frequently expressed against both disabled and queer individuals is a function of fear of the undecidability of the body. I draw on feminist, queer, and disability theory to help us understand this phenomenon and suggest that these different kinds of theories have a complementary relationship. That is, feminist and queer theory help us see how this fear works, disability theory helps us see why it exists.     

Forensic psychology and Islamic jurisprudence

Islamic jurisprudence is the most widely used system of religious law in the world today. However, how forensic psychology may operate within this system has been largely unexplored. The current review sets out to explore the relationship between Islamic jurisprudence and forensic psychology by examining the Islamic legal concepts of evidence, competence, insanity, psychological disorder and intellectual disability and their implications for forensic practice. Also discussed are the potential barriers to forensic psychological practice in countries using a system of Islamic law.     

‘If I only had a little humility,I would be perfect’: Children’s and adults’ perceptions of intellectually arrogant,humble, and diffident people

Abstract

Intellectual humility is usually regarded as a virtue. In this paper, we conceptualized intellectual humility along two dimensions: (1) placing an adequate level of confidence in one’s own beliefs; (2) being willing to consider other people’s beliefs. We tested whether children (ages 4 to 11 years) and adults perceived intellectual humility as positive and how these perceptions changed across development. To do so, we asked participants to evaluate an intellectually humble person as compared to an intellectually arrogant person, who readily dismissed other people’s beliefs, or to an intellectually diffident person, who was unsure of a well-supported belief. Young children did not favor the intellectually humble person over the others, but older children and adults liked this person better and tended to consider her nicer than the arrogant one and smarter than the diffident one. These findings suggest that the virtuousness of intellectual humility in others is recognized from mid-childhood on.     

Child As Metaphor: Colonialism,Psy-Governance,and Epistemicide

This paper mobilizes transdisciplinary inquiry to explore and deconstruct the often-used comparison of racialized/colonized people, intellectually disabled people and mad people as being like children. To be childlike is a metaphor that is used to denigrate, to classify as irrational and incompetent, to dismiss as not being knowledge holders, to justify governance and action on others’ behalf, to deem as being animistic, as undeveloped, underdeveloped or wrongly developed, and, hence, to subjugate. We explore the political work done by the metaphorical appeal to childhood, and particularly the centrality of the metaphor of childhood to legitimizing colonialism and white supremacy. The article attends to the ways in which this metaphor contributes to the shaping of the material and discursive realities of racialized and colonized others, as well as those who have been psychiatrized and deemed “intellectually disabled”. Further, we explore specific metaphors of child-colony, and child-mad-“crip”. We then detail the developmental logic underlying the historical and continued use of the metaphorics of childhood, and explore how this makes possible an infantilization of colonized peoples and the global South more widely. The material and discursive impact of this metaphor on children’s lives, and particularly children who are racialized, colonized, and/or deemed mad or “crip”, is then considered. We argue that complex adult-child relations, sane-mad relations and Western-majority world relations within global psychiatry, are situated firmly within pejorative notions of what it means to be childlike, and reproduce multi-systemic forms of oppression that, ostensibly in their “best interests”, govern children and all those deemed childlike.     

Beyond the Schools of Psychology 2: A Digital Analysis of Psychological Review, 1904–1923

In order to better understand the broader trends and points of contention in early American psychology, it is conventional to organize the relevant material in terms of “schools” of psychology—structuralism, functionalism, etc. Although not without value, this scheme marginalizes many otherwise significant figures, and tends to exclude a large number of secondary, but interesting, individuals. In an effort to address these problems, we grouped all the articles that appeared in the second and third decades of Psychological Review into five‐year blocks, and then cluster analyzed each block by the articles’ verbal similarity to each other. This resulted in a number of significant intellectual “genres” of psychology that are ignored by the usual “schools” taxonomy. It also made “visible” a number of figures who are typically downplayed or ignored in conventional histories of the discipline, and it provide us with an intellectual context in which to understand their contributions.     

基本人权保障与智障者节育手术开展可能性讨论——着眼“南通儿童福利院智障少女子宫切除事件”分析

分析国内外智障者节育手术多年实践提炼出共识:遵循法律规定开展此手术有利于保障而非侵害智障者基本人权。建议我国应出台相关规定为合法开展此类手术提供保障。     

Reconsidering the Social Location of the Medical Model: An Examination of Disability in Parenting Literature

This paper challenges the view that there is one medical model of disability monolithically and oppressively imposed on disabled people. Because the presence of disability may be ambiguous in any given case, multiple actors, lay and professional, may invoke particular medical models of disability and advance competing claims about an individual's disabilities and related needs. The literature for parents of disabled children is seen as a resource on which parents can draw in making claims about their children's disabilities and disability-related needs. Particular attention is given to the assumptions that this literature makes about the identity, resources and dispositions of the audience. Ultimately, these assumptions favor disability claims made by white, highly educated, upper-income parents.