The group of AAIDD experts responsible for defining the condition of intellectual disability to the world now explains the move away from the word “mental retardation” to the term intellectual disability in an article published in the April issue of the journal, Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. “At the heart of this shift is the understanding that this term covers the same population of individuals who were diagnosed previously with mental retardation in number, kind, level, type, and duration of the disability and the need of people with this disability for individualized services and supports,” explain Robert Schalock et al. in “The Renaming of Mental Retardation: Understanding the Change to the Term Intellectual Disability.”

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