Near-death issues and the impact on the sexuality of people with intellectual disabilities during the pandemic

This chapter focuses on young adults with intellectual disability who deal with external societal trauma and death-wishes, stressful environmental factors that impact on identity and life. These young adults often face unconscious and explicit societal eugenic wishes so that their concept of sexuality then becomes tinged with threat. This chapter also looks at the impact of the pandemic, given that those with intellectual disability have experienced some of the highest death rates in the UK. Indeed, the mortality rate in younger adults, compared to the general population, was 30 times higher. This underlines the devaluation of their lives, as well as making the link between intellectual disability, sexuality and a death sentence more explicit.