Engelska - What are intellectual disabilities? Easy-to-read

Intellectual disabilities are sometimes called learning disabilities.
They can be divided into mild, moderate and severe.

The person who has intellectual disabilities needs a longer time and more help than others to learn things.
Some quite common things may be difficult to learn, even if the person is an adult, for example understanding about money, finding their way around and being on time.
It is not possible to remove intellectual disabilities by training, but everyone can learn more by practising.
People with intellectual disabilities are not all alike!

• Some can learn to both read and write, while others can only manage what quite small children can do.
• Some can speak normally, while others only learn to say a few words and need to use signs or pictures to say what they want.
• Some look completely “ordinary”, while others have a slightly more unusual appearance.

How do you find out if someone has intellectual disabilities?

It often starts with adults noticing that the child has difficulty learning many different things that other children of the same age manage.
Adults sometimes discover it when the child is small, and sometimes it is noticed more clearly when the child starts school.
When the parents start to think about whether their child has intellectual disabilities they can talk to a psychologist, a doctor, or others who know a lot about child development.
They talk about how it has been ever since the child was born. It is important to find out if the child has always taken a long time to learn things.
The child does various test tasks together with a psychologist and meet a doctor.
In this way it is possible to find out what the child is good at and how much he or she finds it difficult.

When the psychologist and doctor examine the test results, they look at:

• Whether the child has difficulty learning and understanding many different things that other children of the same age manage.
• Whether the child takes a long time to learn most things.
• Whether there are many common things the child finds it difficult to cope with at home and when he or she plays with children of the same age.

If the answers to these questions tend to be yes, the diagnosis of intellectual disabilities is made.

It may sometimes be that the child finds something in particular difficult for example reading and writing or counting numbers, but copes with other things as well as others of the same age.
If so, they do not have intellectual disabilities.

Why do some people have intellectual disabilities?

In many cases no explanation can ever be found, but sometimes the reason is known.
When the reason is known, there is often a fault on a chromosome or the child has suffered some damage before birth, or when he or she was very small.

Why go to special school?

All children in Sweden have to go to school. The law says so.
Children who have intellectual disabilities can go to special school, where the teachers are trained to make the lessons suitable for each pupil.
Those who, for example, can learn to read can do so and those who need to have training in ordinary everyday things can receive it.
The pace in special school is not as fast as in primary and lower secondary school, because the teachers know that pupils need more time for each thing they have to learn.

What happens when someone who has intellectual disabilities becomes an adult?

Intellectual or learning disabilities stay for life.
This means that some people need a lot of help, even when they are adults, while others perhaps cope with most things on their own.
Almost all move away from home when they become adults.
Those who need a lot of help move to houses or apartments where there are staff to look after the residents.
Those who do not need so much help can live on their own in the usual way.
They may sometimes need extra help for example in reading complicated paperwork, filling in difficult forms and keeping their finances in order.

Written by Kerstin Andersson, Child and Adolescent Habilitation Uppsala