An intellectual disability is not a mental disease, but a predisposition not to use the intellect.
Intellectual disability is not a general term of psychology or psychiatry. Such terms are more specific, with mental disability holding the consensus as the adequate term to designate any general psycho-physical disability. The intellect is itself not recognized as a component of the psyche in modern psychology. It is the psyche. The word is often, but not correctly, used in place of the more likely thinking or cognitive disability and associated with a ìlearningî or ìmemoryî disorder. The word does reference the process of thinking or reasoning, but lapses in the intellect are errors in deduction or induction, even judgment. Such errors do not constitute an intellectual disability.
The word intellect or intellectual is most often used to designate that part of man that he experiences as pure subjectivity. In this usage, intellectual disability refers to a sickness of the entire psyche, which would include not only cognition, perception, and emotion, but imagination as well. The intellect in most literature is often synonymous with the term soul and is also found in the place of the word spirit. In fact, many writers use the term to designate a faculty that has the ability to apprehended pure notions or ideas. Kant assigns to the intellect the faculty of insight into pure forms, into pure ideas that are not givens in the world of sense, in nature. Thus, a disabled intellect in this context would mean a person is unable to take an attitude of interest appropriate to apprehended pure formal ideas. This is more precisely a cognitive disability meaning one is unable to apprehend these preexistences, these abstract ìideasî. Very few people are able.
Modern usage of the term intellect assigns a more inclusive meaning to the term, not limiting it to subjective experience only, but extending it to include all ideas that individuals may or have experienced at one time or another. Modern history, for instance, delineates an entire segment of human history as ìintellectual history. In this view, all ideas, whether in mathematics, science, philosophy, or art, are part of the intellectual heritage of a people, its intellect. Claiming a person has an intellect disability in this context would imply a lack of experience or knowledge in one of any of these areas of intellectual history. We do not say a person is intellectually disabled because they are not conversant with art, sculpture, philosophy, theology or any of the other artifices of the intellect. We would merely say they are intellectually deficient in the given area.
Intellectual disability may be appropriately used, however, when referring to a person who is in fact in a purely vegetative state, rather what we refer to as being brain dead in its strictest medical sense. Describing someone in this condition as having an intellectual disability is more appropriate on the comedy stage when they may be joking of such characters as George W. Bush or Dan Quail.
There is only one place in psychological parlance where one might be said to be disabled intellectually, and this is with reference to intelligence tests, the well known I.Q. Test. A person achieving a low score may be said to have an intellectual disability, but again, this term is extremely general even in this context. Still used to designate such a person, it is now more common to be specific in designating the area of low score, such as being cognitively disabled.
Given that the intellect encompasses the whole mind, and the disability is one of intelligence, the best treatment for such a disability is study, education, and perhaps training in the thinking or reasoning process. This is not a disease, but a deficiency. Study, study, study is the surest cure.
