Background While current practices strive to include individuals with intellectual disabilities in community opportunities, stigmatizing attitudes held by the public can be a barrier to achieving true social inclusion. Methods A sample of 625 community members completed the Social Distance Subscale of the Multidimensional Attitude Scale on Mental Retardation. Results Older and less educated participants held attitudes that reflected greater social distance. Participants who had a close family member with an intellectual disability and those who perceived the average level of disability to be 'mild' expressed less social distance. The limited variability in scores leads us to question our overall finding of very favourable attitudes towards social interaction with persons with intellectual disabilities.Conclusions This study demonstrates that although certain demographic variables are still relevant in identifying social distance attitudes, the measurement of this construct requires revision to ensure a valid and sensitive reflection of the public's attitudes.

Senior psychiatry residents hold attitudes toward persons with intellectual disabilities that are not entirely consistent with the community living philosophic paradigm. More research is needed to uncover how attitudes of psychiatrists develop, as well as how training can influence attitudes.

Objective: To identify the prevalence rate of mental disorders among Ontario children who are permanent wards and also the key practice and descriptive variables associated with their diagnostic status.Method: I reviewed case files from a stratified random sample of 429 Ontario children who were permanent wards with no access to biological parents on December 31, 2003. Data abstracted from files included information on descriptive variables (such as age, sex, and type of permanent ward), all disorders (that is, mental and other current medical diagnoses and disabilities), family history, maltreatment experiences, service history (such as age at admission to care and current residential placement type), and permanency plans.

This study investigated associations between the presence of developmental disabilities and length of inpatient stay for mental health care. All psychiatric admissions of people with developmental disabilities over a 5-year period were selected (n = 294), and were compared using survival analysis to a random sample of admissions from the general psychiatric population (n = 287). Overall, people with developmental disabilities stayed in hospital longer than those without developmental disabilities, and this extra stay was partially attributed to casemix differences between the cohorts. Subanalysis in both cohorts showed that those going back to their usual living arrangement stayed a shorter period than those who were discharged elsewhere, and that people with developmental disabilities were less likely to be discharged to their usual living arrangement than were people without the disability. This study highlighted the importance of specialized residential and personal supports for people with developmental disabilities and a coexisting mental disorder.

When individuals with DD are psychiatric inpatients, their length of stay is affected by some factors that have been identified in previous studies not specific to DD (for example, referral source and diagnosis). Our finding that male patients with DD have longer lengths of stay than do female patients in the same sample has not been reported in previous research.