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Can We Stop Saying Retarded Yet?Yes, it's "intellectually disabled."

By Adrian ChenPosted Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2009, at 6:51 PM ET

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founder of the Special Olympics, died Tuesday morning at the age of 88. A number of articles made note of her work on behalf of the "mentally retarded" or in preventing "mental retardation." Is it still OK to use the word retarded?

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Not really. The current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—which is used by psychiatrists to make clinical diagnoses—still employs the phrase mental retardation to describe people who score below about a 70 on IQ tests. However, most who work in the field—including psychologists, activists, and bureaucrats—prefer the term intellectual disability. (The next revision of the diagnostic manual, due out in 2012, may update its language accordingly.)

Intellectual disability has become the preferred nomenclature only in the past few years, so it's understandable that some newspapers are still using mental retardation. (Even disability experts were uncertain as to the status of the "R-word" until at least 2001.) The nation's most venerable organization of professionals concerned with ID used to be called the American Association on Mental Retardation but renamed itself the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities at the beginning of 2007. Still, the association's Web site contains numerous references to "mental retardation"—a fact its executive director attributes to "housekeeping" issues. The American Psychological Association has moved a little faster, subbing out "Mental Retardation" from the name of its "Division on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities" in 2006. The academic journal Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews updated its name just last year.

Government offices have also been moving away from mental retardation. In the past two months, six state agencies in charge of helping those with developmental and intellectual disabilities have dropped it from their names.

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Explainer thanks Doreen Croser of the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, Sandy Root-Elledge of the Wyoming Institute for Disabilities, and Richard Rowley of the New York State Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities.

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Adrian Chen is a freelance journalist and comedy writer living in New York.

COMMENTS

Here's the ironic part... The so-called "r-word" was once considered the nice thing.

Here's a link to an 1896 New York Times article about Harvard students working at, among other places, a "home for imbeciles." Yes, state-run institutions used that word, but mores started to change.

Yet another example of late-Victorian politeness turning into the hypocritical meanness of the era supposedly dedicated to letting people be themselves.

-- nj_guy
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My 23 year old son has an IQ of 51. He is the most wonderful person anyone can know. He has had so many politically correct labels over the years. But, one thing remains, he is mentally retarded. Get off this "oooh, we might offend" kick. We parents know what are children are and love them just the same. Calling them mentally retarded is NOT the same as calling them a retard.

-- ceu
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It's a losing battle... It's entirely understandable that those with diminished abilities or those advocating for them do not wish to be identified exclusively by their conditions, and they do wish to define the terms of discourse like all savvy post-modern communicators.

The problem is that the terms eventually all come to be synonymous with the condition, which will not go away. Handicapped is banned because it means "handicapped", which itself became a replacement for crippled when that word came to mean "crippled". Retarded means "retarded" which is now a derogatory term so it must be changed to something that does not yet (but eventually will) mean the same thing.

I suspect this temporizing is why so many of us dislike political correctness - descriptive words give way to deliberately ambiguous words, which themselves become descriptive and as such must be replaced by even more ambiguous words, but by nature none of it can be permanent and meanwhile language grows less and less precise.

-- MikeStand
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