Thursday, 10 September 2015

How To Communicate About Individuals With Intellectual Disabilities Properly

By Daphne Bowen


Words, written or spoken, can affect a person tremendously. Like all individuals with intellectual disabilities, can also be hurt and affected by the way we talk about them. Most of the time though, we are careless on how we address topics that are unfamiliar to us.

To clarify, intellectual disability is different from mental illness. Intellectual disability is to have poor scholarly capacity joined with impedance in adjusting to the ordinary social environment. Reasons may incorporate brain damage or hindered advancement as a youngster. Mental illness happens regularly amid pre-adulthood, generally during critical moments of a person's life. Persons with Mental illness even have excellent scholastic record and may lead a seemingly ordinary life.

To be educated is critical to have the capacity to discuss mentally tested people. This article is for writers as well as for any individual can have a discussion with others. Here are a few pointers, gathered by different associations, on the most proficient method to appropriately discuss persons with scholarly inability.

When talking or writing about them, avoid using the words: "retarded, mentally ill, abnormal, insane" or any other term that is synonymous to these. Once a person is labeled retarded, he is misconstrued to be a nuisance and a burden. This isn't the case as many people with intellectual disabilities, look after themselves and strive hard to be good in school.

Children and adults who have intellectual disabilities aren't the same. They are still in a world of their own and must be handled with care for that matter. Anytime a journalist writes about these persons, there is the need to use their full names, for example John Doe rather than using just the first name John.

It is not good to see or portray the life of these persons in an overly dramatic fashion, full of suffering, especially from the family's perspective, and melancholic. This must be avoided at all cost as a lot of those families do not live in such a manner. All the necessary support is received from such families in order to ensure the child has that positive relationship their caretakers and families.

Only a few people know a family with a mentally challenged individual or even the individual himself. Authors and online networking clients have the obligation to edify individuals and depict these people taking an interest in each feature of life - at home or at work. Setting them or partner them with clinics does not help enhancing their picture.

Avoid the terms "victim of", "suffering from", or "unfortunate" when creating write ups about them or talking about them in public. Firstly, because intellectual disability is not a kind of sickness. Secondly, the negative connotation is only how people see them not how those victims see themselves.

All these warning signs may be very limiting but everyone is encouraged to talk and write about them more. Now, they tend to reflect how society chooses them to be - neglected and in order to lift them up and to encourage them more, it is better to talk and write about them in a positive matter.




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