Critical health literacy health promotion and people with intellectual disabilities

Health literacy research and scholarship has largely overlooked the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities (ID), though growing concern about the health inequalities they face has increasingly given rise to health promotion interventions for this group. However, these interventions reference a rather limited vision of health literacy and largely fail to offer people with ID opportunities to develop capabilities to interact with health information in a more critical manner or to develop their understandings of how the wider social context impacts on their own experiences of health and health care. In this paper I offer some explanations for why people with ID have been excluded from the critical health literacy field. I suggest ways that a critical health literacy frame can advance understandings of (1) what literacy in general means for people with ID; (2) what it means for them to take part in critical health literacy practices, and (3) the nature of health texts – what they are and what th...