13 Facts About Intellectual disability

Intellectual disability, known as general learning disability in the United Kingdom and formerly mental retardation, is a generalized neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by significantly impaired intellectual and adaptive functioning.

Intellectual disability becomes apparent during childhood and involves deficits in mental abilities, social skills, and core activities of daily living when compared to same-aged peers.

Since the current diagnosis of intellectual disability is not based on IQ scores alone, but must take into consideration a person's adaptive functioning, the diagnosis is not made rigidly.

Clinically, intellectual disability is a subtype of cognitive deficit or disabilities affecting intellectual abilities, which is a broader concept and includes intellectual deficits that are too mild to properly qualify as intellectual disability, or too specific, or acquired later in life through acquired brain injuries or neurodegenerative diseases like dementia.

Developmental Intellectual disability is any Intellectual disability that is due to problems with growth and development.

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Intellectual disability can be distinguished in many ways from mental illness, such as schizophrenia or depression.

Use of psychotropic medications such as benzodiazepines in people with intellectual disability requires monitoring and vigilance as side effects occur commonly and are often misdiagnosed as behavioral and psychiatric problems.

Intellectual disability has been documented under a variety of names throughout history.

The oldest physiological view of intellectual disability is in the writings of Hippocrates in the late fifth century BCE, who believed that it was caused by an imbalance in the four humors in the brain.

Intellectual disability believed that it was caused by structural problems in the brain.

Intellectual disability pushed for a shift in policy and practice that recognized the human needs of those with intellectual disability and provided the same basic human rights as for the rest of the population.

Some causes of intellectual disability are decreasing, as medical advances, such as vaccination, increase.

Historical terms for intellectual disability eventually become perceived as an insult, in a process commonly known as the euphemism treadmill.