Washington rises: public financial support for intellectual disability in the United States, 1955-2004

Public financial support for intellectual disability in the United States grew from 2.3 billion in 1955 to 82.6 billion in 2004, and the federal government emerged during this period as the principal provider of such support. Notwithstanding this unprecedented growth in financial support, many inequities persist today in the distribution of financial resources and services across states, communities, families and to individual disabled consumers. Moreover, tens of thousands of persons with intellectual disabilities continue to live in institutions and nursing homes, waiting lists and aging caregivers are growing rapidly, and family support and supported employment programs receive limited funding. Research and training support has declined significantly in comparison to the growing financial commitments for services and income maintenance. To address these and other issues, the author suggests commissioning a new "President's Panel on Intellectual Disability" modeled on President Kennedy's landmark 1961 Panel on Mental Retardation. The new panel would be appointed during the first months of the new presidential administration in 2009 and deliver its report to the President in 2011, commemorating the 50(th) anniversary of the original President's Panel.     

Obesity and intellectual disability

While much of the industrialized world struggles for clues to the growing rise in obesity in their respective countries, researchers and service providers involved in understanding the health characteristics and health behaviors of persons with intellectual disability (ID) struggle with their own issues regarding the increased prevalence of obesity in this segment of the population. What is particularly alarming is that adults with ID residing in the United States in smaller, less supervised settings (e.g., group homes and family households) have a significantly higher rate of obesity compared to other countries and those living in larger and more supervised settings (e.g., institutions). These differences support the theory that the environment appears to exert a powerful influence on obesity in this population. Obesity presents a substantial threat to the livelihood of persons with ID and may have an effect on community participation, independent living, and healthy years of life. The lack of research on successful weight reduction strategies for obese persons with ID makes this an important and greatly needed area of research.     

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.     

Which states have the death penalty: data from 1980

A factor analysis of social characteristics of the states in 1980 showed that states with a death penalty were less socially integrated and more southern.     

Killing kids: The juvenile death penalty and community sentiment

In the Supreme Court's Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, “community sentiment” plays a central if not dispositive role in determining if a punishment is disproportionate. To gauge sentiment on the death penalty for juveniles, two experiments with death-qualified subjects were run, where age (a 15–25 age range) and case (heinousness) were varied in the first, and type of defendant (principal, accessory, or felony-murder accessory) and an extended age range (13–25) varied in the second. Significant age effects occur in both experiments, with approximately 75% and 65% refusing to give the death penalty for the youngest (13–15) and next youngest (16–18) groups, whereas 60% give the death penalty for the 25-year-old. In their reasons for their decisions, the killing kid was judged less blameworthy and death-worthy. Although politicians have called for “a man-sized punishment for a man-sized crime,” this community does not see that “man-sized” punishment fitting the kid.