07/24/2025
The file is not the person. But too often, it’s treated as their only truth.
A person with a developmental or intellectual disability can live a whole life, rich with meaning, pain, joy, and complexity, and still be reduced to a few paragraphs written by professionals who’ve known them for just a few hours.
Those paragraphs often contain words that drip with judgment. Non-compliant, inappropriate, resistant, elopement, defiant.
What they rarely contain is humanity.
The file almost never says:
- this person has been failed by multiple systems.
- the person was moved away from everything familiar.
- they have trauma responses, not behavior problems.
The file records every act of defiance and few acts of dignity.
It lists every broken rule, but not every broken trust.
And yet we must read the file. It can offer context, clues, a window into a person’s history. It can help keep people safe. It can warn us of real patterns that matter. But it should never be the first or final word. We read it, and then we let the person speak for themselves.
The danger is not that the file exist. The danger is that we read the file and stop asking questions. That we meet the person and think we already know them.
We owe it to people with developmental and intellectual disabilities to approach each person not with certainty, but with curiosity.
We must let their voice be louder than their file.
Because no one wants to be defined by their worst day, written in someone else’s words.
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ID: Fionn holds a cardboard sign above his head which says "My file is a collection of opinions."
