172 Chapter 7 before comparing them across individuals is the best starting point to move toward research that can answer the million-dollar question for research and practice: what works when and for whom? Epilogue: who have I studied? At the end of my PhD journey, I find myself increasingly questioning the nature of the one commonality of all people described in this dissertation: a mild intellectual disability. To explain what this "something" is, that we refer to as mild intellectual disability, I usually refer to the three criteria of the DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2013): 1) intellectual deficits, 2) adaptive deficits, and 3) the onset of intellectual and adaptive deficits lies before the age of 18. After having met many very different people with a mild intellectual disability, I wonder whether that classification does them justice. That is, saying "he has a mild intellectual disability" to me now means that this person is described in an essentialist manner: as a permanent characteristic they can have. A large body of empirical work (including much work I have cited in this dissertation to substantiate my own research) therefore studies mild intellectual disability by comparing behaviors of those who have a mild intellectual disability versus those who do not. However, an essentialist account of mild intellectual disability does not resonate with the conclusions of this dissertation: people with mild intellectual disability form a highly heterogeneous group whose behaviors change continuously over time. This epilogue consists of four parts. First, I will first revisit descriptions of the intellectual and adaptive deficits that are characteristic of a mild intellectual disability, arguing that they lack clear cut-offs, and depend on cultural norms and peer comparisons. In the second part, I attempt to illustrate the main issue: a mild intellectual disability is no root cause for problems, but merely a name that is given to describe problems. This name, however, is mistakenly framed as though it were an explanation for those problems. Please bear in mind that the points I will make certainly do not mean that I negate the authenticity of problems that people with a mild intellectual disability diagnosis face, nor their need for care that takes their abilities into account (on the contrary). Rather, I wish to prompt a debate about societal and scientific consequences of how we colloquially use the descriptive term "mild intellectual disability" as explanatory for adaptive and intellectual problems. In the third part, I will therefore lay out potential positive- and unintentional negative effects of diagnosing someone with
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