Silk purses and sows' ears: the social and clinical exclusion of people with intellectual disabilities

Abstract

This paper examines society's unconscious refusal to welcome people with intellectual disabilities from the margins of society, with particular focus on a specific manifestation of this enactment of social exclusion by the psychotherapy profession. I form connections between a societal disavowal of the human rights of people with intellectual disabilities and the psychotherapy world's paranoid fears of inviting the socially and cognitively excluded into its consulting rooms. Through an examination of the notion of social exclusion and cognitive deficit being mutually sustaining phenomena, I explore the detaching of people with intellectual disabilities from social relations and institutions, using as my main example the relative failure of contemporary psychotherapy in its various forms to include this patient group in its range of possible beneficiaries. Using various aspects of intersubjective, object relational and organisational perspectives, I consider the improbability of people with mild, moderate and severe intellectual disabilities reaching the apex of our globalised western society, and the various social ruptures that conspire to deny those with cognitive deficits a place at the social, economic, political and psychological table. I compare some literary representations of intellectual disability with more contemporary televisual portrayals, and consider the possibility of social inclusion through a rejection of a social model of disability that creates an artificial boundary between the 'disabled' and the 'non-disabled'.

Supporting People with Intellectual Disability Who Have Experienced Abuse: Clinical Psychologists' Perspectives

“…Other systemic factors highlighted included the possibility of exclusion from opportunities afforded to the mainstream population. These issues have been highlighted previously (Brown, Duff, Karatzias, & Horsburgh, ; Corbett, ). Further, as indicated in our study's findings, the misinterpretation of abuse symptomology as challenging behavior may be detrimental to individuals with ID.…”

Beating the barrel of inclusion: Cosmopolitanism through Rabelais and Rancière – A response to John Adlam and Chris Scanlon

“…10. This argument is also made in Corbett's (2011) paper, when he states that 'hatred' of learning disability arises to defend a posited ability: that such hatred is a way of preventing contamination by another, and establishing one's difference and superiority as 'able'.…”

“…As Alan Corbett (2011) argues, educational distinctions betray a fear of contamination -a fear, one could argue, of equality. Phrases like 'every child matters' and 'no child left behind' express the obligation and commitment towards an inclusive society; but they also 'discover' exclusion; founding it by establishing the terms and conditions of inclusion, and promising to 'help' the excluded meet them (Popkewitz, 2009).…”

‘I want you to be able to see it’: Diogenes and pathological hoarding

“…If we were to really see and hear the distress that her acts communicate, we could acknowledge that this client, like many others, in her own way occupies the 'caesura' of the hinterland between the in-and the out-group (Foucault, 2004;Corbett, 2011;Scanlon and Adlam, 2011). In this way it becomes possible to understand the relational meaning of the hoarding behaviour, that necessarily includes us.…”