Disability Of Mind Research Articles

Reading Lessons Planning With Students With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities in Mind: Needs-Based Assessment Proposal.

This study addresses the need to reinforce the reading learning of students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) in general education classrooms. A standardized way of assessing support needs in reading (SNr) from the teachers' perspective is proposed. The objectives were (i) to develop an instrument and evaluate its properties and (ii) to preliminarily assess the support needs in reading of students with IDD. Participants were 86 Chilean elementary school teachers who responded about the support needs of their own students. The instrument assesses three dimensions (i.e., representation, engagement, and action and expression). Analyses showed excellent preliminary evidence of validity and reliability. Preliminarily identified support needs suggest that students need more support in representation. Practical and research implications are discussed.

"We're Not Patients. We're Inmates": Older Black Women's Experience of Aging, Health, and Illness During and After Incarceration.

The incarcerated population is growing older and by the year 2030, more than one third of people incarcerated in the United States will be over the age of 55. This population shift will have a profound impact on correctional health care systems as older incarcerated people often have multiple chronic illnesses and correctional institutions were not designed with aging and disability in mind. Black women experience greater burdens of comorbid conditions and are disproportionately represented among incarcerated women. We utilized Black Feminist Epistemological Methodology to explore the intersection of aging, chronic illness, and mass incarceration via in-depth interviews with 13 formerly incarcerated older Black women. First, participants described needing to prove themselves to be trustworthy prior to becoming ill in order to be believed and granted access to care when they report symptoms. Next, participants report being treated, not as patients, but as "inmates." The punitive nature of prison health care disrupted the patient-provider relationship and complicated the ability of patients to maintain autonomy in health care interactions. Finally, I describe how carceral health extends beyond the walls of both the clinic and the institution. For older Black women, medical care and decision making inside prisons occur within a punitive context, which presents unique barriers when seeking care. Their experiences of health and illness while incarcerated may continue to influence if and how they seek care as they age in the community and thus must be interrogated when discussing aging in the Black community.

“They Weren’t Necessarily Designed with Lived Experiences of Disability in Mind”

Using semi-structured interviews with disabled archival users and building on the emerging field of critical access studies, this article illustrates the ways in which archival spaces and their in/accessibility affectively impact disabled people. Interviewees describe how they experience barriers to accessibility not only at a basic, architectural level – of not being able to get into a building or archives room – but also through archives’ policies and expectations regarding the ways in which archival work is done. The way that accessibility is implemented, even beyond legal compliance, greatly impacts the extent to which disabled researchers feel they belong in archival spaces. Inaccessibility, this research shows, produces a sense of unbelonging; the deprioritization of disability both as a subject or organizing category and as an identity of a potential researcher, shows disabled people that they do not belong in archival spaces, and this is further complicated for multiply marginalized disabled people. By examining the multifaceted ways that disabled people experience inaccessibility, this article focuses on the “emotionally expensive” aspects of inaccessibility to emphasize the ways in which barriers compound and accumulate and can prevent disabled people from accessing our own histories. These findings demonstrate how central accessibility is to disabled people’s lives: it is almost impossible to talk about our experiences of archival materials and history without discussing how we navigate the multiple barriers to accessing them.

An intricate encounter? Cultural significance and accessibility in the conservation of the 19th and 20th century monuments of Thessaloniki, Greece

Located in the north of Greece, the city of Thessaloniki encompasses approximately 320 monuments of the 19th and 20th century. Addressed under Greek law as “modern” monuments, most of them were conserved over the past 40 years, with little if any attention to the issue of adaptation to accessibility needs in the initial conservation works. Nonetheless, in more recent projects, specific care was displayed, largely through interventions aiming to facilitate physical access, with two cases of people with disabilities in mind, namely users of wheelchairs and people with restricted mobility.
 In each of these interventions, two special issues arise: on one hand, the extent to which the safeguard of cultural significance has placed limits on the pursuit of accessibility, and on the other, the degree to which the initiatives undertaken for accessibility have affected cultural significance. Based on extensive on-site research and genuine evaluation, this paper seeks to provide a complete picture and didactic appraisal of this two-way relation. To this end, it undertakes a thorough analysis and assessment of the interventions completed in the so far three main directions of action for accessibility improvement in the “modern” monuments of Thessaloniki: (1) Establishing an entrance, (2) Providing unobstructed horizontal circulation, and (3) Ensuring smooth vertical movement. This analysis allows for a clear answer to be given to the question posed in the title, in addition to revealing prospects for the enhancement of the encounter of cultural significance and accessibility in the most sizable segment of Thessaloniki’s architectural heritage.

Hacking new musical instruments and considerations of disability in design

We report our findings of an instrumental case study of the ‘New Musical Instruments Hackathon’, which was hosted by Monthly Music Hackathon New York City. Our article commences with an overview of research literature on hackathons in general and then proceeds with a discussion of research on making accessible musical instruments, which occurs in multiple fields. Following, we outline our methodological approach that employed video-recorded observations and semi-structured interviews to examine how participants displayed and discussed hacking new musical instruments, and how, if at all, they designed with disability in mind. Our findings provide a description of the various activities that took place over the course of the hackathon event, two vignettes that detail the working processes of participants working on projects, and participants’ responses to semi-structured interview questions. While we are situated in the field of music education, our theoretical framework is rooted in disability studies, and our findings from this study may be applicable to those with an interest in the intersection of disability, music and technology. Our analyses and discussion confirm how many of the activities that occurred within this hackathon align with previous research on non-music hackathons; however, there are some notable differences that may be attributable to music hackathons and/or this specific hacking community in New York City. Finally, we make clear the conspicuous absence of design discussions and actions that centre disability and how this issue might be addressed in future research and practice.

Content and Feature Preferences for a Physical Activity App for Adults With Physical Disabilities: Focus Group Study.

BackgroundHundreds of thousands of mobile phone apps intended to improve health and fitness are available for download across platforms and operating systems; however, few have been designed with people with physical disabilities in mind, ignoring a large population that may benefit from an effective tool to increase physical activity.ObjectiveThis study represents the first phase in the development process of a fitness tracking app for people with physical disabilities interested in nontraditional sport. The aim of this research was to explore user preferences for content, appearance, and operational features of a proposed physical activity app for people with physical disabilities to inform the design of a mobile phone app for increasing physical activity.MethodsFour focus groups were conducted with 15 adults with physical disabilities who currently participate in nontraditional, non-Paralympic sport. Data collected from the focus group sessions centered on content, functionality, and appearance of apps currently used by participants as well as preferences for a future app.ResultsParticipants (mean age 35.7, SD 9.2 years) were mostly white (13/15, 87%), and all were currently participating in CrossFit and at least one other sport. Five main themes were identified. Themes included preferences for (1) workout-specific features that were tailored or searchable by disability, (2) user experience that was intuitive and accessible, (3) profile personalization options, (4) gamification features that allowed for competition with self and other users, and (5) social features that allowed increased interaction among users. Participants expressed a primary interest in having a fitness app that was designed for people with physical disabilities such that the features present in other fitness tracking apps were relevant to them and their community of adaptive athletes.ConclusionsThe results showed that features related to user experience, social engagement, and gamification are considered important to people with physical disabilities. Features highlighted by participants as most desired, from a consumer perspective, were in line with research identifying attributes of quality apps that use behavior change techniques to influence positive physical activity behavior change. Such insights should inform the development of any fitness app designed to integrate users with disabilities as a primary user base.

Access to Waterfront Landscapes for Tourists Living with Disabilities

Abstract In this paper an overview on the inclusive spatial design tools providing equal access to waterfront landscapes for tourists living with disabilities will be given. The focus is on close-to-natural areas which are popular because of their recreational potential. These areas present special natural and landscape values, and mostly are ecologically vulnerable. In these important ecological surroundings human presence and landscape values must be harmonized. Environmental conditions, legal requirements and the economic situation can limit the opportunity for comprehensive access, but keep disability in mind while designing and maintaining these sites is a potential to provide wider access to the waterfront tourist destinations. We are about to present model solutions keeping the environment totally or mostly in its original, natural condition, but allowing recreational activities in the site at the same time.

“We don't know. We've never had anybody like you before”: Barriers to perinatal care for women with physical disabilities

BackgroundWhile more women with physical disabilities are becoming mothers, many encounter barriers to perinatal care and experience poor outcomes. Little is known about the perinatal care experiences and outcomes of women with physical disabilities in Canada. ObjectiveThis qualitative study sought to understand the perinatal care experiences and outcomes of women with physical disabilities in one Canadian province, with an emphasis on identifying barriers to care. MethodsIn-depth interviews were conducted with 13 women with physical disabilities who had given birth in the last 5 years. Follow-up interviews were conducted with 10 of the 13 participants. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data analysis was informed by a constructivist grounded theory approach. ResultsBased on analysis of participants' interviews, five themes regarding barriers to care were identified: (1) Inaccessible care settings, (2) Negative attitudes, (3) Lack of knowledge and experience, (4) Lack of communication and collaboration among providers, and (5) Misunderstandings of disability and disability-related needs. ConclusionsStudy findings reveal that the perinatal care system is not set up with women with physical disabilities in mind and that barriers to perinatal care may contribute to poor outcomes. More research and training are needed to address barriers to perinatal care for women with physical disabilities. Collaboration among perinatal and disability-related providers and meaningful inclusion of women with physical disabilities in educational initiatives and care plans are vital to improve care experiences and outcomes.

Design and Fabrication of Hybrid Vehicle for Disabled Persons

Disabled Persons are one who has either legs or hands and it is duty of every individual to safeguard them. Government is helping through various schemes by supplying wheel chair etc. there is need for sophisticated vehicle for them to work in the factory by moving inside the factory premises, moving inside the house premises and office premises. The primary objective of this project is to develop a vehicle for Disabled Persons especially for people without legs. Hence extensive research was carried out to come out with this idea and its methodology by Voice of Customer and Quality Functional Deployment (QFD) analysis. Here handle bar is used with accelerator and brake incorporated. The Permanent Magnet Direct Circuit (PMDC) Motor is used in the brake drum driven by battery / solar current since this is a vehicle primarily designed for Disabled Persons, the vehicle is designed considering their disability in mind and much importance is given regarding the safety of the passenger after. Hence driver ergonomics plays a key role in the designing of vehicle for legless persons. Handle bar designed to suit both manual steering and electric steering. Chassis design and center of Gravity is calculated and the Brake is kept in the Handle Bar.

Afterword: Against “global mental health”

A surely foundational question for psychiatric science is the ontological status of ‘‘mental disorder’’. One attempt at a definition would be the one used in the UK Mental Health Act – this might be expected to be rigorous since it legitimates involuntary detention: a mental disorder is ‘‘any disorder or disability of mind’’. This is no definition at all, merely a circularity or tautology. In fact psychiatry has no answer to the question ‘‘what is a mental disorder?’’, and instead exalts a way of working it has devised: if there are sufficient phenomena at sufficient threshold, a mental disorder is declared to exist! This is as much alchemy as science. Once something is declared real, it becomes real in its consequences. In practice, mental categories emerge as DSM or ICD committee decisions based on symptom clusters clustered by us, not by nature. This has not retarded their use as if they were facts of nature identifiable ‘‘out there’’ as is, say, a tree or a broken leg. The authors of DSM and ICD do state that ‘‘there is no assumption that each category of mental disorder is a completely discrete entity with absolute boundaries dividing it from other mental disorders or from no disorder’’ but this does not deter the American Psychiatric Association (APA), who aver that mental disorders will all eventually boil down to brain disorders (Kendell & Jablensky, 2003).

INTELLECTUAL DISABILITY AND MYSTICAL UNKNOWING: CONTEMPORARY INSIGHTS FROM MEDIEVAL SOURCES

AbstractIntellectual disabilities make people vulnerable to marginalization in churches and social spaces, but theology has not sufficiently attended to the topic and promoted the flourishing of people who have cognitive impairments. This article responds to theology's inadequate attention to intellectual disability and historical resources for reflection on the topic by reading medieval sources with intellectual disability in mind. I argue that Bonaventure's Itinerarium Mentis in Deum provides a model for imagining intellectually disabled and nondisabled people sharing the journey into God and that Eckhart's view of intellect as the uncreated element in the soul includes people who are intellectually disabled among those who may be united with God.

Conceptualizing Supports and the Support Needs of People With Intellectual Disability

This is the third in a series of perspective articles (Schalock et al., 2007; Wehmeyer et al., 2008) from the Terminology and Classification Committee of the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AAIDD). The purpose of these articles is to share our thoughts on critical issues associated with terminology, definition, and classification in the field of intellectual disability and to seek input from the field as we prepare the 11th edition of AAIDD’s Diagnosis, Classification, and System of Supports Manual (the working title). In the first article (Schalock et al., 2007), we explained the reasons for shifting from the term mental retardation to intellectual disability. Although the two terms cover the same population of individuals, we concluded that intellectual disability was the better term because it

A scandal of poor care

It is remarkable that anyone with learning disabilities has ever received good care from the NHS. According to the Michael report, published last week, services are not catering for them and the laws to protect them from discrimination are often ignored. The inquiry team did find evidence of good practice, says the report, but ‘where it does occur it is attributable to the energies of individual enthusiasts battling against the odds, rather than to systems designed with people with learning disabilities in mind’.

“Moby-DickIs My Favorite:” Evaluating a Cognitively Accessible Portable Reading System for Audiobooks for Individuals With Intellectual Disability

Significant barriers exist for individuals with intellectual disability to independently access print-based content. It is regrettable that, while the amount of content now available electronically increases, tools to access these materials have not been developed with individuals with intellectual disability in mind. This article reports the results of research evaluating the use of a palmtop PC-based application designed to enable individuals with intellectual disability to access electronic books and documents. Participants with intellectual disability were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 groups, each group differing in the type of audio player used. Participants who used the specially designed reader made significantly fewer errors accessing electronic books and required significantly fewer prompts than did participants using either of 2 mainstream audiobook readers.

Health-Related Quality of Life in Patients with Spinal Cord Injury: Review of the Short Form 36-Health Questionnaire Survey

Advances in medical and rehabilitative care have increased interest in studying how different factors may affect the health-related quality of life (HRQOL) of individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI). There has been a large increase in the number of studies assessing HRQOL among persons with SCI. However, despite these advances, numerous issues remain unanswered because these studies have used a variety of methodologic approaches and assessment tools to examine how different factors have a role in predicting HRQOL in SCI populations. Therefore, standardized instruments should be used as part of this process. The Medical Outcomes Study Short Form (SF-36) was developed in order to survey health status of the general population. However, the available data on the HRQOL of individuals with SCI are currently limited. In addition, there is little information currently available on the factors that are associated with HRQOL in the SCI population and this issue remains controversial. The findings from several individual studies that used the SF-36 to assess the HRQOL of patients suffering from SCI were reviewed, and the results were interpreted with disability in mind. This review article aims to summarize the data regarding the HRQOL of individuals with SCI by using the SF-36.

Integration of intelligent network services into future GSM networks

This article introduces various difficulties and issues in the basic scenario of integrating intelligent networks (INs) and the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). As an example, implementation of Universal Personal Telecommunications (UPT) is considered. This article does not offer a comprehensive analysis, but rather a tutorial view. The separation of cellular networks and IN is not well suited to provide common mobility-related services. The present signaling systems do not enable transfer of mobility-related parameters, such as the cell identity and international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI). A call connection to the service switching point must be set up every time IN services are used from the GSM network. The same information is stored in several network elements, and service creation and management are complex. With those disabilities in mind, two integration scenarios are introduced and their characteristics are compared. However, the aim is not to give detailed guidance for implementation, but rather to introduce different options and describe their most significant characteristics. It is important to be able to provide mobility-based information directly to the IN. Flexible integration calls for changes both in mobile exchanges and signalling systems. Mobile exchanges will be built with additional IN functionality and, in fact, future signalling systems will better carry mobility-related information. Mobility can be implemented with a rather small investment, provided that there are digital exchanges and transmission systems and the basic infrastructure has already been built. The required intelligence can be offered by using the existing Public Land Mobile Network (PLMN) or IN architecture.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

The psychotherapy of psychopathic disorder

The Mental Health Act 1983 definition of psychopathic disorder includes the concept of ‘a persistent disorder or disability of mind’. If this is taken to mean a wide variety of further definable mental disorders, then it is a potentially useful vehicle for ensuring treatment for many distressed, difficult and dangerous people, who would otherwise fall through the net because they are not ‘mentally ill’. The psychopathological features of people with behaviour problems, as they emerge during therapy, fall into at least six broad categories which, although not mutually exclusive, have, in the author's experience, a useful bearing on ‘treatability’ and prognosis. Each of these personality types is described in turn, together with an indication of its implications for treatment.

Culpable mental disorder and criminal liability

Anglo-American criminal laws allow accused persons to reduce or avoid criminal liability by demonstrating that they were affected by a disability of mind at the time of the offense. For such disabilities, including anger, drug impairment and automatism to be effective as defenses, an accused must prove to the court that the relevant state of mind was involuntarily incurred. When the accused’s passionate anger is an unavoidable response to provocation, culpability is reduced; unprovoked anger may be equally impairing but it is not equally excusing. Similarly, accidental drug impairment is much more exculpating than an identical disability of mind wilfully created by the accused. Automatism cases also discriminate between inadvertent causes, such as a blow to the head, and culpable circumstances involving drugs or jealous rages. These familiar legal distinctions are not applied to mental illness because the law now assumes that genuine mental illness is always inadvertent.’ According to orthodox opinion the mentally ill are victims of inescapable determinants and tend to be regarded as especially dangerous and irrational.Z Challenging the orthodox view, I will argue that the mentally ill are not irrational or particularly dangerous, and that most neuroses and psychoses are indirectly advertent. The thesis to be analysed is that mental illness is the psychological equivalent of the hangover, depression, addictive compulsion and ill-health associated with excessive drug consumption. If mental illness is in some part the result of a rational, though excessive pursuit of psychological satisfactions, then the current legal treatment of the mentally ill will have to be revised. From their review of the law, Fingarette and Hasse conclude that a disability of the mind is nonculpable only when it is involuntarily induced,” and that the present legal view of drug addiction is unsound because addiction is the in-

The Disability of Mind Doctrine

Much of the controversy surrounding the insanity defense arises because the modern defense is not based on fundamental analysis and because it has developed in isolation from other modern mentaldisability defenses. Unrelated doctrines, arising out of different early cases, have become increasingly unrealistic. Confusion and frustration ensue. The Disability of Mind (DOM) doctrine resulted from the attempt to identify the fundamental legal and moral issues in mental-disability defenses. Several moral-legal intuitions emerged that underlie the legal concept of a mental-disability excuse, whether based on mental disease, intoxication, trauma, organic damage, or some other condition. These intuitions were developed into a coherent legal doctrine intelligible, in its essentials, to juries and the public. This doctrine covers all mental-disability excuses in the law. The doctrine, key concepts, and some practical consequences that should build public confidence in the DOM defense are explained here.

Ten Studies Into Psychopathic Personality.

This book concentrates on the study of psychopathic disorder as defined in the 1959 Mental Health Act in Great Britain. This definition reads as follows: A persistent disorder or disability of mind (whether or not including subnormality of intelligence) which results in abnormally or seriously irresponsible conduct on the part of the patient, and requires or is susceptible to medical treatment. The subjects who provided the material for the observations and studies reported on are 100 consecutive admissions and one later admission to Balderton Hospital, a state hospital near Nottingham in the Midlands. The criteria for their selection were that they had an IQ over 60, were over 13 years of age, that they were deemed in need of psychiatric hospital admission, and were not neurotic or psychotic. They had to have demonstrated antisocial behavior as evidenced by prior convictions for the large majority of