Specialized Therapy for People with Disabilities
Fall 2023 3rd Place Winner
by Abbie Sanders, Master of Public Administration
My chest tightens when I pass someone with an intellectual disability. It’s a combination of emotions — pity, guilt, frustration, and general helplessness. I want to reach out and touch their arms, to look them in the eyes, to cry. Do you ever feel that way? It’s an inexplicable draw to a life that could have so easily been yours, one chromosome or gene or cerebral fold away. That life hasn’t been mine to live, and I want to change those whose it is.
A close friend told me about a young man named Aaron. Aaron’s mom asked my friend to hang out with Aaron a couple times each week. Sometimes Aaron is silent when they meet. Sometimes he’s wild and silly. Sometimes, for a laugh, he pulls down his bathing suit at just the moment he’s about to jump from the diving board at the public pool! Sometimes he’s lonely and withdrawn. He’s just a teenager, tall and gentle and awkward like many others his age. Aaron also has Down Syndrome. I was captivated by my friend’s experiences with Aaron. She told me about his highs and lows, how his mood often changes. How he is sad some days and on top of the world the next. Aaron’s feelings, I thought, sound a lot like mine.
One day, Aaron’s mom took him to a therapist. She wanted Aaron to receive some emotional guidance, just like we all need. The therapist, upon seeing Aaron, said that she couldn’t help him. Not for lack of want, but she felt unqualified. This was a common theme in Aaron’s mother’s quest to provide her son necessary therapy; there are few therapists that are qualified to help people with intellectual disabilities.
I was overcome by Aaron’s story. Suddenly, my lifelong pull toward those with intellectual disabilities made sense. I feel so much responsibility for my awareness of this niche corner of the world. For decades, psychologists believed that the intellectually disabled couldn’t have mental illnesses, but that has been enormously disproven. Yet those archaic beliefs are perpetuated in the sheer lack of available therapeutic resources for the intellectually disabled. People with developmental disabilities are just that — people. They comprise only a tiny fraction of the population, but this is their world too! Aren’t they just as entitled, just as deserving, just as important to receive the therapy they need when they need it?
Aaron and others like him should never scramble for therapy. As a student emphasizing in nonprofit management, I want to start a foundation that provides special training for therapists and teaches them necessary skills to help those with intellectual disabilities. I want to provide an easy connection for people like Aaron and his mom to capable and specialized therapists. My chest still tightens. It’s tight even as I write this. I know now that it’s a tightening of hope and excitement because, as badly as I want to change their world, they’re already transforming and motivating mine.