Mental Retardation - Society and Culture

Society and Culture

People with such disabilities are often not seen as full citizens of society. Person-centered planning and approaches are seen as methods of addressing the continued labeling and exclusion of socially devalued people, such as people with disabilities, encouraging a focus on the person as someone with capacities and gifts as well as support needs. The self-advocacy movement promotes the right of self-determination and self-direction by people with intellectual disabilities, which means allowing people with intellectual disabilities to make decisions about their own lives.

Until the middle of the 20th century, people with intellectual disabilities were routinely excluded from public education, or educated away from other typically developing children. Compared to students with intellectual disabilities who were segregated in special schools, students with intellectual disabilities who are mainstreamed or included in regular classrooms report similar levels of stigma and social self-conception, but more ambitious plans for employment.

As adults, people with intellectual disabilities may live independently, with family members, or in different types of institutions organized to support people with intellectual disabilities. About 8% of people with mental retardation live in an institution or group home.

In the US, the average lifetime cost of mental retardation amounts to $1,014,000 per person with mental retardation, in 2003 US dollars. This is slightly more than the costs associated with cerebral palsy, and double that associated with serious vision or hearing impairments. Of that $1,014,000, about 14% is due to increased medical expenses (not including what is normally incurred by the typical person), 10% is due to direct non-medical expenses, such as the excess cost of special education compared to standard schooling, and 76% is indirect costs accounting for reduced productivity and shortened lifespans. Some expenses, such as costs associated with being a family caregiver or living in a group home, were excluded from this calculation.

Abusive terms for intellectual deficits are common insults, and are most commonly applied to non-disabled people. For example, in the 1964 movie Becket, King Henry II calls his son and heir a "cretin." Mental health professionals discourage use of these terms. The abbreviation retard or tard is still used as a generic insult. A BBC survey in 2003 ranked retard as the most offensive disability-related word, ahead of terms such as spastic or its abbreviation spaz(which are not considered offensive in America) and mong. A campaign led by people with intellectual disabilities and the Special Olympics to eliminate the "R word" has resulted in federal legislation to replace the term mentally retarded with the term intellectual disability in some federal statutes.