What is Mental Disability?
The mentally disabled are persons living with limitations in two separate domains. The first domain is significantly sub-average intellectual functioning. The second domain is limitations in two or more of the ten separate adaptive skills. The ten skills are:
- Communication
- Self-care
- Home living
- Social Skills
- Community use
- Self-direction
- Health and Safety
- Functional academics
- Leisure
- Work
KSMH efforts and resources are spent on this second domain of interventions aimed at enhancing acquisition of adaptive skills for independent living.
The organization is therefore less concerned with the first domain because little can be done to uplift the intellectual domain especially for the severally and profoundly persons with mental disabilities. But for the mild and moderate persons with mental disabilities, efforts and resources are spent on both the first and the second domains.
Mental disability is understood as meaning disability of a person five years of age or older that is:-
- Attributable to mental or physical impairments or a combination of mental and physical impairments.
- Is manifested before a person attains age twenty-two
- Is likely to continue indefinitely
- Results in substantial functional limitations in three or more of the following areas of major life activities i.e. Self-care; Receptive and expressive language; Learning; Mobility; Self-direction; Capacity for independent living; Economic self-sufficiency etc.
- Reflects the person’s need for a combination and sequence of special interdisciplinary or generic care, treatment, or other services that are life-long or are individually planned and coordinated.
A team of multidisciplinary specialists determines mental disability using dual criteria of intellectual sub-normality, developmental delay and deficits in adaptive behaviors.
The specialists stress that there are four key assumptions essential to the determination of mental disability. Any such assessment of an individual’s special needs, must take into account the following:-
- Cultural differences in individual circumstances
- The influence of community environment on the development of adaptive skills
- Individual’s relative strengths in various domains of development.
- The improvements in the life functioning that can occur with appropriate supports.
Definition of Mental Disability Based on Social Constructs.
A social construct refers to how society expects people to function intellectually, interact with, and adapt to the world around them.
Mental disability is seen as something that cannot be simply and scientifically designed, discussed, dissected, applied or studied. It is related to our very understanding of humanity, potential, of educability, of equality, of rights and privileges, of everything we are and everything that relates to us. For example asking someone to comprehend a concept of mental disability is akin to asking him to comprehend a concept of decadence, beauty or ugliness, strength or weakness, good people or bad people. It can’t be encapsulated and “pictured” by IQ parameters or even etiological descriptions, or behavioral assessments. It must always be anchored to other people, a community, value expectations and hopes.
It is important therefore to stress in the definition, the many types of mental disabilities among them developmental disorders, pervasive developmental disorders, which includes academic, languages, and speech disorders, and motor skills disorders. These are children whose developmental disorders affect learning and/or adaptive behavior that require early intervention in modifying their instructional programs.