Try This in Breakout Rooms: Empathy Project

 

Empathy Test! Try This

Try doing these exercises:

1. Coat a pair of glasses with a thin layer of Vaseline. Put the glasses on and then color a picture in a child’s coloring book. Stay inside the lines.
2. Put an oven mitt on your dominant hand. Open a box of crayons or wooden matchsticks, dump them out on a table, then pick them up one by one and put them back in the box, using the gloved hand.
3. Take a piece of rope and tie your knees together. Walk across the room. Try running. Now hop and jump.
4. Quickly read the following paragraph:                                                                            Eht qaimtimg also proved that, sa wwell sa being a great humter, Cro-Wagom Nam saw a comsiberadle artist. He dah flourisheb ta a tine whem eno fo eht terridle Ice Age saw dlotting out nuch of Euroqe. He dah estadlisheb himself, fought wilb aminals rof livimg sqace, surviveb eht ditter colb, amb left beeq bown umbergroumb nenorials fo his yew fo life!
5. Sit in front of a mirror with a maze or design from a coloring book. Look in the mirror and complete the maze or trace the outline of the design as quickly as possible. Stay in the lines and trace only when looking in the mirror.
6. Put a spoon in your mouth and read the last exercise aloud. 

Now, imagine feeling similar frustrations every waking hour as you try to accomplish even simple tasks that society expects of you. That is the lifelong struggle against intellectual limitations and compromised living skills facing people with mental retardation. 

The exercises only hint at the range of learning and physical impairments that may characterize mental retardation, a term that many people in the field claim is itself stigmatizing and outdated. But the stigma of “intellectual disability,” as many prefer to call it, runs deeper than any label or medical term; it is rooted in a long history of societal perceptions and misconceptions that have categorized people as mentally deficient and, therefore, somehow less than fully human. 

Even as the stigma long stamped on mental illnesses such as depression or schizophrenia has begun to fade, perhaps as a result of wider recognition that these disorders are brain-based biological conditions, a similar public enlightenment has largely bypassed mental retardation. 

DISABILITY: IN THE BRAIN, IN THE PUBLIC MIND-reducing the "stigma"

Some people in the field, however, suggest that thinking about mental retardation as a brain disorder only reinforces the stigma. 

• David Coulter, M.D., current president of the American Association on Mental Retardation (AAMR) says: “With mental illness, emphasizing the biological basis takes it out of the realm of ‘craziness’ or personal fault and into the realm of brain chemistry, something for which a person cannot be held personally responsible. 
• The root of stigma in people with intellectual disabilities is based more on exclusion, perception of differences, lack of respect, and lack of a sense of value and dignity—even sub-humanity. If society emphasizes the biological basis of intellectual disability, it would be making people even more different. It would only reemphasize the things that I think drive the stigma.” 

 “Mental retardation is not a disease,” says Coulter. “It is a statement about how a person is functioning cognitively within a social context.” 

• In 1992, the AAMR published a definition of mental retardation that reflected a new view of the condition, not as a mental illness or even a medical disorder but as a state of functioning that begins in childhood and is characterized by limitation in both intelligence and adaptive skills.
• Coulter believes that “The paradigm shift we introduced in 1992 was truly revolutionary in changing the way people think. What we’re saying is that, while mental retardation depends to some extent on what is going on in a person’s brain, it also depends on the demands and expectations of the environment. Maybe we, as a society, can work on all that to improve functioning.”

“... you can talk about curing mental retardation if you could set up a person’s environment and support him or her in such a way that the person is able to function just as you and I do.

•  His remark hints at a fundamental question to which diverse answers come from researchers, clinicians, and policymakers in the field. What does it mean to talk about the possibility—even the hope—of not only treating but also curing mental retardation? In Coulter’s view, 
• Instead of thinking that it’s something you are born with and is never going to change, we can say, yes, it can change. In the right context, mental retardation could even go away.”