 |
Let’s start with disability in general. The World Health Organization estimates that around 10% of the world’s population, 700 million people, live with some kind of disability. That’s the world’s largest minority.
But what about intellectual disability? There are no solid statistics, only rough estimates, on the global prevalence of intellectual disability.
We know that the Canadian estimate varies from about 0.7% to 2.5% of the Canadian population. That’s somewhere between 245,000 and 875,000 people. The estimate most often used is that 2% or 700,000 Canadians have some type of intellectual disability ranging from very mild to profound. We can be more accurate about the numbers of people with moderate to profound intellectual disabilities because they almost all use services of some kind. They are thought to represent 0.35% of the total, or about 125,000 people.
Why such a variance? For one thing the rate of disability found in household surveys and censuses varies dramatically. This variation results from differing measures of disability, different data collection techniques, and different reactions to survey questions by respondents. There is also broad consensus that there is a “hidden” population of people with intellectual disabilities.
In the United States The President's Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities (PCPID) says that nearly 30 million families in the United States, or about one in ten, are directly affected by a person with intellectual disability at some point in their lifetime.
Numbers don’t tell the whole story but any way you cut it, the impact of intellectual disability is more than most people appreciate. And behind every number is a person and a story. There are parents and siblings and extended family.
Intellectual disability knows no boundaries. It cuts across the lines of racial, ethnic, educational, social and economic backgrounds. It can occur in any family.
It matters that we are all in this together.
Nathan
