Additional Documents – services for adults with developmental disabilities

In this report, we use the term developmental disabilities because it is the term adopted in our provincial legislation. Other jurisdictions use different terminology to describe similar disabilities or conditions. For example, in the United Kingdom, the same population is often referred to as individuals with learning disability. In the United States, the term developmental disabilities has a broader connotation than it does in Ontario, including other types of disabilities that occur in the developmental period but that do not include significant cognitive limitations. In the past, the term mental retardation was commonly used in medical settings.This term is now considered pejorative and has been removed from legislation in Ontario and in the United States, as well as from medical jargon. It has been replaced with intellectual disability in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and with disorder of intellectual development in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).

There is an ongoing debate about the use of ‘person-first’ or ‘identify-first’ language. In this report, we use the ‘person-first’ language throughout; that is, we refer to adults with developmental disabilities as opposed to developmentally disabled adults or the developmentally disabled.

What are developmental disabilities?

Under Ontario’s Services and Supports to Promote the Social Inclusion of Persons with Developmental Disabilities Act, 2008, developmental disability is an umbrella term for different disabilities that involve the person having “prescribed significant limitations in cognitive functioning and adaptive functioning and those limitations, (a) originated before the person reached 18 years of age; (b) are likely to be life-long in nature; and (c) affect areas of major life activity, such as personal care, language skills or learning abilities, the capacity to live independently as an adult or any other prescribed activity.” (Also see Ontario Regulation 276/10 of the Act at http://www.e-laws.gov.on.ca/html/regs/english/elaws_regs_100276_e.htm.)

As defined in the Act, cognitive functioning refers to “a person’s intellectual capacity, including the capacity to reason, organize, plan, make judgments and identify consequences.” Adaptive functioning speaks to “a person’s capacity to gain personal independence, based on the person’s ability to learn and apply conceptual, social and practical skills in everyday life.” Conditions such as intellectual disability, autism, Down syndrome and fetal alcohol syndrome would all fit under this umbrella term.

Developmental disabilities can be genetic in origin (e.g., fragile X syndrome or Williams syndrome) or can be caused by illness or injury prenatally (e.g., maternal rubella or maternal alcohol consumption) or in early childhood (e.g., meningitis); in some cases, their cause is unknown. In Ontario, medical disabilities, such as cerebral palsy or epilepsy, and psychiatric disorders are not considered developmental disabilities unless they meet all of the criteria of the above definition.