Mental health services for people with intellectual disability in Israel--a review of options

Intellectual disability (ID) (often also referred to as "mental retardation," "development disability," "mental handicap," "learning disability" or as "generalized learning difficulties") is common in all countries. Many people with ID suffer from psychiatric/behavioral/emotional disturbances (known as "dual diagnosis"). Specialist psychiatric services are needed to address these problems effectively, but are not currently available in most countries, including Israel. This article sets out to describe the problems, current services in Israel, approaches in other countries and proposed solutions for Israel. We believe it important to enforce laws against discrimination based on disability, to raise the general awareness, knowledge and skills among generic mental health professionals on the topic of intellectual disability by inclusion in university, postgraduate and in-service training curricula, to work towards a form of subspecialty within psychiatry along the lines of the model in the United Kingdom and to establish specialized psychiatric services, possibly functioning as back-up to the generic psychiatric services.