Background The experience of caring for a son or daughter with an intellectual disability has long been recognized as stressful. The long‐term health costs for parents of people with intellectual disability have attracted some recent research attention, but mortality has not been studied.
Methods The present authors examined mortality as measured by the standardized mortality ratio (SMR), and cause of death for parents of people with intellectual disability, identified through an intellectual disability register in Merton, south London.
Results Although there was a trend for lower SMRs particularly for mothers, SMRs were not significantly different from unity. Subgroups of parents whose child was cared for predominantly in an institution, or in the family home were analysed and similarly showed no significant difference from unity. The same applied to cause of death analyses.
Conclusions These findings offer some reassurance to parents of people with intellectual disability. There is an urgent need for further research in this area.
Self-restraint often appears to be associated with self-injurious behaviour (SIB) and has been described as an attempt to prevent or escape from SIB. Research into the determinants of self-restraint is limited and this single case study assesses the environmental determinants of self-restraint and SIB and describes the relationship between the two behaviours. Observations in the natural environment were conducted for 16.5 hours and data were collected on SIB, self-restraint and environmental events. Sequential analysis showed that SIB and self-restraint were unrelated to environmental events and that the behaviours co-varied inversely. SIB occurred at higher than chance levels immediately following self-restraint and also at high levels immediately prior to self-restraint. Whilst these results would appear to support the hypothesis that self-restraint was negatively reinforced by escape from SIB, the data cannot be explained solely by this theory. The implications of these findings for the behavioural theory of SIB and the conceptualisation of self-restraint are discussed.
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