From whence came mental retardation? Asking why while saying goodbye.
Language evolves—update your reports and goals now to match "intellectual disability."
01Research in Context
What this study did
David and colleagues traced how professional groups stopped saying "mental retardation."
They looked at meeting notes, policy books, and public statements from 1950 to 2007.
The paper is a story, not an experiment.
What they found
Big groups like the AAMR changed their own names to drop the R-word.
Each change aimed to lower stigma and include more people.
The shift took decades, not months.
How this fits with other research
Friedman (2016) shows the lag: years after Rosa’s Law, most Medicaid waivers still used the old term.
Matson et al. (2013) parts I and II turn the history into a toolbox, giving you exact words to use in reports.
Together the papers form a timeline: first the idea, then the law, then the slow paperwork catch-up.
Why it matters
Your words shape dignity. Swap "mental retardation" for "intellectual disability" in every report, goal, and team meeting today. The history proves language moves culture, and you move language.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Reflections of the Senior Author The senior author (senior in more than one sense) was given cause to reflect on the meaning of the term mental retardation when he received his 30-year certificate and pin for continuous membership in the American Association on Mental Retardation in 2005. When he became a member of the organization in 1975 as a doctoral student at Columbia University, it was the American Association on Mental Deficiency that he joined. Although the focus of his studies at Columbia was mental retardation and even though that term had been the accepted terminology in the field for many years, the primary organization for students, professionals, scholars, and advocates in mental retardation still used the term mental deficiency in its moniker. This remained the case for the first 10 years of his membership. He is now a member, of course, of the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, the official name as of January 1, 2007. He is also a member and board member of the Division on Developmental Disabilities of the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC), which was formerly known as Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities (MR/DD), and earlier still as CEC-MR. Although these organizations have not explicitly rejected mental retardation as a term, they have clearly acknowledged the importance to their identities of terminology that is more inclusive, less stigmatizing, or both.
Intellectual and developmental disabilities, 2007 · doi:10.1352/1934-9556(2007)45[132:FWCMRA]2.0.CO;2