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CRANSTON, R.I. -- Rhode Island leaders gather to celebrate the re-naming of a state agency.
A new sign was revealed Sept. 15, removing the word "retardation" from the former Department of Mental Health, Retardation, and Hospitals in Cranston.
The agency will now be known as the Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities, and Hospitals.
The General Assembly approved the name change earlier this year following lobbying by Special Olympics and other advocates for the developmentally disabled, who launched a campaign called "Remove the R Word."
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From WPRI-TV in R.I.:
