The History of People with Developmental Disabilities

It wasn’t until February of earlier this year that I was jolted by the exposure to the history of people with developmental disabilities. Talk about going into a sudden plight of brief depression. It was extremely eye-opening and mind boggling to me on how this scope of humanity could be maltreated; not nearly as bad as the Hitler era, yet the same concept of being eye-opening and mind boggling and the horrible treatment of human beings.

Since the inception of man, there have always been people who have developmental disabilities, or they became disabled through TBI-traumatic brain injury, war, or some type of accident. So where have these people been? What a great question? I know for me when I was growing up, which was in the heart of the Midwest—E.St.Louis, IL/ St.Louis, MO, I remember a school bus driving down the freeway, and for some odd reason, I just knew that “those” kids weren’t like my brothers and sisters and I. Never in that moment in time did I even entertain the thought that some day my son would be one of “those” kids. In answer to the question of where have they been, they have been stowed away, ridiculed and even put to death, with just a number on their tombstone as their identity.