I remember that kind of thing in the early days of AIDS too.
I remember a cartoon in “Gay Comics” in the late '90: it was groups in the Pride Parade that didn’t make the headlines, and one was PWAs (Persons with AIDS) who didn’t think it gave them a whole new outlook on life, dammit."
Sure. People who have intellectual disabilities are far more likely to have a mental illness than the general population, regardless of the cause of their ID. I don’t have the figures on hand (but I could look them up for you at work if you like) but I believe the risk of developing a mental illness if you have ID is roughly 3x a typical person.
My uneducated guess is because most of us only know a person with DS via media. TV shows or movies usually show them as being happy go lucky people. A quick “Down’s Syndrome” google image search shows them almost all smiling. http://preview.tinyurl.com/hzfo4f6 (cut the huge google url to this)
It appears that persons with Down Syndrome are more likely to have behavioral problems that neurotypical peers but fewer than those with other intellectual disabilities. Here is a good overview and this is a small study of the kind of mental health disorders associated with Down Syndrome.
That kind of sums up what I was trying to say. My experience of trying to schedule respite care staff is that people with DS are very easy to staff because they have fewer issues relative to the population we work with, and generally good social skills. That doesn’t preclude the possibility of the occasional DS person who is a real asshat, but we would sometimes have a really difficult-to-staff person who would hit staff if she got taken by surprise. We once had someone who had all her stuff like her TV and DVD player bolted down, because she threw stuff. Those were never people with DS.
I believe this is quite likely.
Whoever said that is a freakin’ moron. NO, it’s not “fortunate” to have a child born with a significant disability. Now, it’s great if you, personally, can focus on positives while raising such a child but it’s NOT FORTUNATE. This gets into the martyr-caregiver myth where the support system for the Happy Cripple[TM] is composed of saints with endless patience who are “happy” to give up their lives and ambitions for the care of the disabled one.
Even worse if the family isn’t upper middle class or better, because the needs of a disabled child can easily break the finances of a family lower down on the socio-economic scale.
Stupid statement - it’s almost certain that autism isn’t caused by just one gene. This is stupid hoping for a quick and easy solution to a problem that doesn’t have a quick and easy solution.
Busking mime juggling.
Probably confirmation bias. Although from personal experience, I cannot recall a Down Syndrome person who did not have the gleeful happy outward appearance, so that may be the sort of thing that makes people think Down Syndrome = happy.
Absolutely. Autism is a spectrum, or even an entire group of conditions under one umbrella. Like “cancer” it’s quite a broad term. We may end up finding one gene alone that can cause symptoms if mutated, though, and that would account for a percentage of those who have autism.
I’d heard that Autism is, or at least was, an exclusionary diagnosis (I can’t think of the proper term). When X symptoms are present, and we can’t find any other reason, we call it autism. That may have changed in recent years. Once you had a known cause, it wasn’t autism anymore. I do wonder if this will change as we get more knowledge in the field of of genetics.
Rett Syndrome used to be classified as autism. But once a genetic cause was determined (90+% of cases come from a mutation of the MECP2, it eventually got reclassified as not-autism (think it took 14 years). Two other genes also cause Rett (or at least, a very similar set of symptoms, in less than 10% of Rett cases). It can be tested for genetically. I do think there is a minority of cases where it’s none of those three genes, but I’d guess that’s it’s quite possible those will turn out to be one-gene caused, as well. And I’m not even sure if they’ll definitively diagnose them as Rett these days when the genetic cause can’t be found.
I think Rivkah has the right idea here. It’s not that people with Down Syndrome are happier, it’s that the specific impairments usually caused by Down Syndrome don’t affect empathy and social skills as much. And so someone with a fairly severe intellectual impairment can still respond appropriately in interpersonal situations. Someone can be profoundly disabled yet have islands of high functionality.
“Happy” isn’t the way to put it. More able to participate in normal social interactions compared to other people with comparable intellectual disabilities from other causes is a better way.
That just means it’s a lot less emotionally draining to work with Down Syndrome people than people with other forms of disabilities. Taking care of someone who appreciates you and is friendly to you is a lot easier than taking care of someone who’s disengaged or hostile, even if the things you need to do for them are exactly the same.
As one example, my recollection is that the character with DS on Life Goes On was generally portrayed with a highly positive attitude.
Chris Burke is also very high functioning.
I’ve heard of people who had Down Syndrome AND autism. Rivkah, have you?
Yes, but it’s unusual. I’ve also met people with DS and ideopathic alopecia. In the case of one person I know, the mother had a brother with low-functioning autism. I also know a person with DS and near-normal intelligence who is a great conversationalist, and just generally an interesting person. She got an AA degree from a community college, although it took her several years, and raised a very bright and charming daughter. Her parents and sister are exceptionally bright.
So having DS does not preclude inheriting other traits from one’s family. A person could probably have DS and ADHD or OCD as well.
There are some DS people who are extremely low functioning, and if they had a co-morbidity, it would be hard to diagnose, while the DS is easy because of the facial features and other physical markers. I don’t know what the “spread” of abilities looks like for DS-- whether it’s a straight line or a bell curve, or a curve that tends toward the lower or higher end. I know personally I have met DS people who represent many different levels of functioning, from full independence to more like a toddler, even as an adult, and I have not formed an opinion as to where the majority lie.
My partner did years of direct care for adults with various cognitive problems in both institutional and non-institutional settings, and his very strong opinion was that DS people had comparatively intact empathy and social intelligence - and can use it to be complete jerkwads (not all of them, obviously). He witnessed DS people who were happy and affectionate when talking to doctors or administrators, and would earn special privileges thereby, but would be surly and abusive when dealing with staff and direct caretakers. He thinks that the myth of “Happy Downs Syndrome” is because DS people retain enough social intelligence to know when to smile for the camera, so to speak.
Note: he doesn’t think that DS causes a higher incidence of jerkwads, but he did think that DS jerkwads got away with it more often because they were better at social manipulation and making themselves look good to those in authority than other cognitively impaired people.
I have absolutely no experience in the field, but I wonder if the professionals who regard DS people as happier tend to be those in higher-authority positions, while direct caregivers might have a different opinion.
I work in special ed and a few of the children in the program have Down syndrome. I have not found this generalization to be true at all. A couple of them are very social and pleasant (though quite academically challenged) and some others are behavioral nightmares. Hair-pulling, kicking, scratching, throwing things, body-dropping, eloping from the room, screaming at the top of their lungs, stealing and hiding things, hitting other children, spitting, you name it. Not all the time by any means, but when these kids don’t want to do the task in front of them (or can’t do it and are trying to escape it), well, good luck. Happy all the time with sunny personalities? Certainly not.
There’s a well-known quote that “If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism.” I would say it’s the same with Down syndrome. It’s a spectrum of skills, abilities, and behaviors.
Ever seen the “Educating Peter” series that aired on HBO in the 1990s? (I’m pretty sure the episodes are now on You Tube.) His parents, who were clearly in denial about his abilities, demanded that he be mainstreamed. There are situations where it’s appropriate to do so, and this was NOT one of them. He was in a 3rd or 4th grade classroom, even though he was barely verbal and not potty-trained, and was also violent. I don’t think they even had an aide for him, although this was before aides were common in classrooms anyway.
Some people with mosaic Down syndrome are very high functioning; the extra chromosome is in any division of 8 ranging from 12.5% to 87.5% of their cells, and the lower the percentage, the higher functioning the person is, and less likely to have other issues like heart and intestinal defects. I had never heard of this until an acquaintance’s granddaughter was born with 25% mosaicism; she has the typical Down’s facies and some developmental delay but no other issues. Last I heard, she’s in school in a special ed program.
As for depression, etc. that’s very common in higher-functioning people with developmental disabilities anyway because they know they’re different. 
p.s. Regarding mosaicism? This may also account for false-positive or false-negative amniocentesis, for this and other conditions too. At the 8-cell stage, the cells begin to differentiate, which is also why we could never have more than identical octuplets.
In other words, all the genetically diseased cells would go to the placenta, or to the baby. I’ll leave further discussion about this to people who know more about it than I do. 
Someone else mentioned that people with Down’s are very prone to an Alzheimer’s-like condition when they hit middle age. That’s true and I’ve encountered a few cases of it; these people do lose the ability to live independently on any level and usually must be placed in a nursing home. That’s where a lot of them end up anyway, and in some cases, that is indeed the proper placement for them. They’re all different.
I collect old medical books, and one of them has a picture of a young man with achondroplastic dwarfism and (as they were described at the time) “Mongoloid idiocy”. :o
I just thought of a young woman who is also a high-functioning person with DS; she lives in a supervised apartment with her best friend, who also has DS, and they work at a sheltered workshop that has a van which takes them to and from work every day. Their parents manage their money, and I remember when she was in high school and there was a very real possibility that she might be able to get a driver’s license. She turned out to have the intellect to drive, but her hand-eye coordination was not good enough, so she did not proceed beyond the permit stage.
I remember that. It made me so mad, because it was everything that was wrong with mainstreaming. I’ve worked with some deaf children who didn’t belong in public school, and fortunately in the one case of which I’m aware of the outcome, the child went to the Deaf School when he was in the third grade. He blossomed socially. Later, his mother told me that something I said helped her make the decision: I said I thought he had leadership potential, but he needed to be in a majority-signing environment to capitalize on it. Apparently he actually did end up being the BMOC, and in high school played shortstop and captain of the baseball team, and was prom king one year. He would have always been tagging behind the hearing kids with an occasional friend who chose to learn some sign if he’d stayed in public school.
I almost quit working with that kid, because I didn’t think he belonged in public school, but I stayed because he was so young, and historically, a lot of Deaf people didn’t go away to school until 7 or so, and just stayed at home doing nothing. His family was in flux, and if his parents had him at home for kindergarten and first grade, then sent him to the Deaf school, he’d be fine. And he was. I run into his mother every few years, and he’s totally independent, working as a master mechanic, married with one kid so far, and works in the pit crew for a stock car racer. He is very close to his mother and brothers, and the whole family signs, so maybe those few early years were good too, because that’s probably why his brothers sign so well.
I probably shouldn’t be so free with information, except I know no one will ever meet him, I didn’t give any names or locations, and it was a really long time ago. If this were a current job, I’d never talk about it like that.
My friend who has an AA degree and a college-aged daughter probably has mosaicism, although I never asked, but she has never had any health problems. She drives, too, but she didn’t get her license until she was in her 20s. I’m not sure why she waited. I know she had a special teacher, and she doesn’t drive at night. She also has a cushion and blocks on the pedals, because she’s under 5’.
I can’t say enough about how poised this woman’s 21-year-old daughter is. She is so bright and charming, and mature for her age. It sort of gives you a glimpse into what the women would be like if she hadn’t had Down Syndrome, and what sort of probable genetic advantages may be lurking behind the extra chromosome, that explain in part why she is so high-functioning.