Juniper Publishers- Journal of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

JUNIPER PUBLISHERS - OPEN ACCESS JOURNAL OF INTELLECTUAL & DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES As impressive as our technological triumphs are, they do nothing to relieve our interpersonal difficulties. Nor do they clarify our relationship to nature because they do not elucidate who we are and how we can better relate to each other. Unfortunately, neither the social sciences nor arts offer much toward resolving or clarifying the underlying philosophical issues. The social sciences give muddled if not contradictory answers which create as many problems as they solve while art devolved hopelessly in demoralizing phases from the primitive to the infantile to the inane if not insane in our paranoid, self-constructed, post-modern, fragmented, relativistic, subjective, deconstructive world [1] in which nonsense seems relevant [2] when packaged as targeted nonsense [3]. Symptomatically, poet Henry Longfellow was dismissed by 20th century critics as a 19th century windbag for lacki...

  JUNIPER PUBLISHERS - OPEN ACCESS JOURNAL OF INTELLECTUAL & DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES The field of genetic epidemiology includes three sets of studies: family, twin, and adoption studies. This commentary argues that findings from these studies are sometimes used to blame parents for the development of developmental disabilities, emotional problems, or problem behaviors in their children. For this reason, this paper concludes that genetics as explanations of psychopathology among children is sometimes the enemy of parents and those parents should avoid mental health practitioners who emphasize genetics in the explanation of why children develop such psychopathology. Keywords: Parents; Genetics; Family studies; Twin studies; Adoption studies Introduction The gene concept in the explanation of mental disorders Mental health practitioners generally agree with the role of genetics in the presentation of physical characterist...