179 General Discussion 7 Where to go from here To prompt a discussion, I have several humble suggestions that may potentially leverage some of the aforementioned issues, each of which has its pros and cons. All suggestions largely evolve around adapting our semantic description to meet a complex reality, striking a balance between destigmatizing and acknowledging problems. First, even though the diagnosis does not refer to a natural kind, the problems are real. Therefore, we could keep the diagnostic process as is, but frame the group as "people with intellectual and/or adaptive problems". Second, the care needs are also real, so why can we not stick to that term? Claiming that a person has "specialized care needs" is perhaps more valid and less stigmatizing than saying they have a mild intellectual disability. To me, it also better encapsulates the prospect of future change. Currently, society is organized in such a way that a diagnosis gives someone access to specialized education or care, even though the mild intellectual disability is seldom the explicit target of the intervention. Therefore, it would make sense to call the diagnosis "intellectual and/or adaptive problems" or "specialized care needs" instead. A third option, in case letting go of the term "disability" is too big of a step, it could be rephrased to "being on the disability spectrum". That would circumvent terminologies like moderate-, mild-, and borderline- intellectual disability that imply them to be an essence they "have" with non-existing cut-offs. This would follow the unification of disorders like PDD-NOS and Asperger syndrome, which equally lacked clear demarcations, onto a single diagnostic category (autism spectrum disorder). Stretching the diagnosis may do better justice to its lack of strict cut-offs, but on the other hand risks an increased likelihood of labeling more and more people less intelligent to be on the spectrum, thereby fostering a culture of excessive sensitivity (Haslam, 2016). The aforementioned three options still involve a kind of compartmentalized thinking. A fourth option, the lens of complex systems theory, offers a somewhat more radical change compared to the current situation, which may be the least realistic alternative but is still worth discussing. That is, a mild intellectual disability could be framed as an undesirable context-specific (attractor) state. As Chapter 5 showed, behaviors can vary massively between contexts but are relatively stable across similar contexts. Furthermore, Chapter 6 hints that the use of attractors can work destigmatizing, as an attractor can be either desirable or undesirable. Viewing a mild intellectual disability as an attractor state would not deny that the person is at a disadvantage in specific context(s), but in my opinion, more aptly conveys that it is an individual-specific mismatch between personal abilities and environmental demands that lead to patterns of problems at moments in time. In other words, a highly dynamic, personalized, and contextualized pattern. For example, when a young person excels more in trading drugs than
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