Should Mentally Disabled People ‘mix’ with Normal People?

If you haven’t already – I would strongly advise you to watch this TED talk. It’s about a woman who was told her entire life that she would never amount to more than a person with a mental disability…

So she fixed her brain.

TED Talk:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0td5aw1KXA

Let me first start by saying that a mental disability is a very broad term. It describes a person who lacks something mentally that others in their society have. There are many different types and it ranges from mild to severe, however some people can go their entire lives not ever knowing or ever being diagnosed.

The reason for this is that we use comparative methods to diagnose mental disability. In a society where learning to read and write is not necessary, a person with numerical or verbal difficulties would never be identified, however as the world becomes more and more advanced it seems that more and more people are becoming marginalized because they are different.

The other day I was teaching my cousin for her sociology exam and we covered ‘school and education’ as a module. It was very interesting to me because I was learning as well as teaching – I didn’t realize that as well as learning subjects we were actually being taught behavioral lessons such as discipline, respecting those who know more than us (people in authority) and social skills such as patience and tolerance.  This was a strong part of the non-examined curriculum which I had never really acknowledged. Although in principle this would mean that children with mental disabilities would be treated well by other children, this is not usually the case.

When we think about these things from the viewpoint of someone like my sister, someone who has mild Williams Syndrome, the entire institution of a normal school will just highlight her weaknesses and never find her strengths – and that’s exactly what it did.

Going to schools for people with special needs where teachers are qualified and empathetic is a much better environment for someone who has a mental disability – it shows them that they are different, not disadvantaged. I feel that now that we have these institutions, we need to take it to the next step and find out through personality tests and psychological experiments what it is that these people excel at individually.

When someone cannot walk, staircases make them feel disabled – however if we make ramps available they will no longer ‘be’ disabled. I believe that everyone has a strength, and it is time for us to stop focusing on what they cannot do, and find out what they excel at – simply placing them in an environment where they will most definitely be ‘inadequate’ is the first thing we need to stop doing.