I don't think I'm telling anyone anything they didn't know already by saying this:  People who are developmentally or emotionally disabled have difficulty navigating in society.  Sometimes they manage reasonably well, but they're rarely well accepted, and they are allowed "in" only so long as nothing goes wrong.  When there's a problem, the hammer comes down.

www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=20332 is the story of such a person.  Leroy stepped over the boundaries  and now he's basically sentenced to a mental health facility.  Maybe temporarily, maybe for life.

The article and the comments point out one of the toughest problems — that people who know Leroy know how to deal with him, but strangers don't.  He can't tolerate alcohol, and will react poorly to it and then have a seizure.  People who know him would never give him a drink but strangers might, and he will drink it, with disastrous results.  He's a big strong guy and he will get very close to you and tell you he loves you.  Strangers take this as threatening, and I don't blame them for that.  People who know him know he's just being Leroy.

That Leroy has gone for so long without institutionalization is probably thanks to the community support he enjoys.  Not everyone with his problems is equipped with the kind of sunny personality that lends itself to getting that kind of support.

I don't have answers, but this just points out one of the ways in which many of us are one bad turn away from being invisible, one bad turn away from being outcast, one bad turn away from being discarded completely.  People who are temporarily abled think it can't happen to them — but a brain injury or stroke or chemical imbalance, while it wouldn't make them developmentally disabled, could make their lives equally challenging, and put them in Leroy's situation in an instant.