Delirium in adults with intellectual disabilities and DC-LD.

Simpson (2003) showed how to spot delirium in adults with intellectual disability (ID).

Two real cases walked readers through the DC-LD checklist step by step.

The trick: compare the person’s current behavior to their known baseline skills.

Using DC-LD, clinicians could say “yes, this is delirium” instead of guessing.

The checklist caught sudden changes in attention, mood, and daily skills that standard tools miss.

The same year, Gravestock (2003) used DC-LD for eating disorders in adults with ID. Together, the two papers prove the framework works across very different problems.

Hove et al. (2008) later built P-AID checklists from DC-LD and tested them on a larger group. They found good reliability, moving the idea from case stories to numbers.

Hoogstad et al. (2026) took a similar path for PTSD, showing ID-friendly interviews keep helping long after Neill’s first delirium demo.

If you work with adults who have ID, sudden confusion is easy to miss. Keep a short DC-LD cheat sheet in your bag. Next time a client acts “off,” ask staff, “What could they do last week that they can’t do today?” That quick compare-to-baseline step turns a hunch into a documented delirium diagnosis and gets the right medical help faster.