Did you know social workers get minimal training in dealing with IDD individuals?

Intellectual disabilities are impairments that start developing during infancy or childhood. These are marked by severe restrictions in cognitive ability and adaptive behavior. People with intellectual disabilities may struggle with social skills like interpersonal relationships and social problem-solving, conceptual skills like language and self-direction, along with practical skills necessary for daily living. Social workers have long worked with people of all ages with intellectual disabilities, including children and adults, and frequently collaborate with the families providing care for them. So it goes without saying that It’s critical that social workers understand the problems related to intellectual disabilities when dealing with the said individuals. 

In the US, more than 7 million people have IDD and over 700,000 social workers are employed. But it’s unclear how many of them are qualified to assist IDD individuals. It appears that the topic of IDD is barely touched. The content is so inadequate that it does injustice to people with IDD and social workers who wish to work with them.

So what’s the current situation?

With 1 in 6 children having developmental disabilities and 1.2 billion older adults in the US predicted to have IDD by 2030, it is highly likely that a social worker will work with an IDD individual. The worst part is that until the last two decades, the general public did not fully understand its prevalence.

  • Lack of awareness: Due to the lack of awareness, IDD individuals’ needs and requirements are hardly understood. Understanding the mental illnesses associated with IDD is a far-fetched topic to discuss and it is believed that those with IDD couldn’t participate in psychotherapy.
  • Misled Perceptions: To make matters worse, there are misperceptions about people with IDD because of how they are portrayed in films, TV shows, and other societal contexts.
  • Lack of knowledge: Another misconception is that people with IDD have severe disabilities, necessitating lifelong care. Whereas in reality, this is not true. Most IDD individuals fall into the mild IDD category regardless of whether they have an organic or known cause.
  • Conventional treatment systems: Additionally, patients with IDD are managed using a conventional medical diagnosis model. It may result in healthcare professionals failing to comprehend the particular needs of their patients and thus failing to offer the best care. Additionally, when content specifically addresses practice competencies with people with IDD, it frequently uses medical and rehabilitation models of disability that neglect to take into account societal and environmental factors that present difficulties for people with IDD. 

This ignorance can leave social workers feeling anxious or helpless when dealing with people with disabilities. They might be uncertain about how to alter their treatments to serve their patients better. Due to this, they might be less likely to offer adequate mental health care to people with disabilities.

  • Lack of resources: The most common way that future and current social workers learn is through experience. After receiving a graduate or post-graduate degree, students mostly obtain that experience through an internship or in the workplace. The latter scenario is most likely for social workers who encounter people in various service sectors rather than just working with the IDD population. This creates a learning curve that causes a delay in providing services to people with IDD. 

Many IDD houses lack experts who are highly knowledgeable about the available resources in the area. Something that will improve their quality of life. Something that will make the social worker competent and an IDD individual satisfied.

What are the changes?

The good news is that seasoned social workers have observed significant changes in the situation regarding stereotypes and stigmatization of people with IDD. Even though there’s still much that needs to change, people are changing for the better and educating themselves.

Social work is uniquely positioned to remove the structural obstacles preventing people with IDD from being fully included in society because it is a human rights profession.

Social work to resolve macro-barriers to community inclusion, obliterate the injustices that people with IDD continue to face, and transform the rhetorical promise of community inclusion into reality. 

Using a human rights-based framework, aligning with person-centered planning, encouraging evidence-based practices, utilizing participatory action research, increasing the amount of disability content in social work curricula, and participating in community action and advocacy are just a few of the ways social workers can promote community inclusion for people with IDD.

Below are the good practices if done right can bring a lot of change;

-Include information on the disability rights movement in the content on social activities and systemic oppression.

-Include neurodiversity in classroom discussions and content on diversity, ethics, and pressure.

-To provide new opportunities for social work pedagogy to conceptualize disability in the context of a human rights framework and equip social work students better to support people with IDD competently, and integrate disability studies into generalized and specialized course curricula.

-Increase the number of opportunities for students to engage with the disability sector through fieldwork and/or internships.

Here’s the chance to improve:

Social workers have hardly ever been acknowledged in the context of the IDD field and have primarily remained invisible despite changes in national and international policies related to IDD. Unfortunately, only some social work students indicate they want to work with clients with IDD as their target clientele.

In the effort to include people with IDD in the community, education is a potent tool. Current social work education does not provide enough information on disabilities to adequately prepare students for working with people with IDD, despite the fact that the disability rights movement is in line with the profession’s emphasis on social justice and equity. 

Due to the underrepresentation of IDD experiences in social work curricula, neurodiversity and disability are frequently overlooked in the context of diversity. People of color and transgender people have been marginalized, just like people with IDD. Although significant efforts have been made to uphold the worth and dignity of transgender and people of color, we hope to see some positive changes in IDD individuals’ lives since they are still largely excluded from discussions and activism on systemic oppression and diversity.

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