Diagnostic Overshadowing Amongst People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities — Deadly yet Avoidable Risks
Imagine that you are a young adult with a developmental or intellectual disability — you are minimally verbal (but have been labeled non-verbal) yet you understand a lot more than people think you do. You have been given an antipsychotic medication for a few months and have just started getting an increased dosage — part of your “plan.” Nobody explains the medication to you nor do they explain what adverse effects you may experience, especially with the increased dose. You quickly experience the most frightening experience of your life — your tongue gets stuck in your mouth, you have trouble breathing, and your neck feels like it’s stuck in one position. You grab at your caretaker to try and tell the caretaker that you’re scared and need help. Your caretaker luckily realizes that you need medical help, so you get rushed to the hospital.
At the hospital, you hear several nurses and doctors say “calm down” and talk about you in front of you but nobody talks directly to you. You are scared and nobody is telling you what’s going on, so you move in various gestures trying to communicate. The healthcare workers keep saying “challenging behaviors” and “SIBs” while they give you some kind of medicine through a sharp object into your arm. Nobody tells you…
