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The Origin And Nature Of Our Institutional Models

From: Changing Patterns in Residential Services for the Mentally Retarded
Creator: Wolf Wolfensberger (author)
Date: January 10, 1969
Publisher: President's Committee on Mental Retardation, Washington, D.C.
Source: Available at selected libraries

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"It is a matter of history that the two principal measures of social control in which main reliance was placed, during this period of alarm, for coping with the problem of mental deficiency, namely, sterilization and segregation, have failed to meet the situation as completely as the proponents of these measures had expected" (Davies, 1930, p. 130).

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Taft (1918) proposed a new alternative to the field; identification, supervision, and control of the retardate in the community. This, it was widely felt, required that all retardates be registered (Hasting, 1918), and there was widespread agitation to accomplish this. Fernald had advocated such registries all his life (for partially different reasons), but now the idea found new support, although to no avail.

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The 1930 White House conference on Child Health and Protection proposed a three-stage program to attack the problem of retardation. Stage one was identification and registration; stage two was divided into training of some and segregation of others; and stage three involved supervision, or, as it was frequently referred to, "social control," of the community retardate. Registration was the key to the entire program. A most prominent text of the period between the alarmist one and the new enlightenment of the 1950's was Social Control of the Mentally Deficient (Davies, 1923, 1930).

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Today, of course, we know that most retarded adults make an adequate adjustment in the community, and that they are more likely to be the victims rather than the perpetrators of social injustice. It is also widely accepted that heredity is a relatively insignificant factor in the causation of retardation, as compared to maternal health and socio-cultural factors.

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Momentum Without Rationales

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We are now coming to a crucial point in this exposition. We cannot understand the institution, as we know it, with all its objectionable features, unless we realize whence it came. I propose that essentially, many of our institutions, to this very day, operate in the spirit of 1925 when inexpensive segregation of a scarcely human retardate was seen as the only feasible alternative to combat a social menace. I am not proposing that this view is still held; I am proposing that most institutions function as if this view were still held. I will try to explain this hypothesis.

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From 1847 to about 1925, institutions had evolved dynamically as ideas and innovations followed each other continuously. We can now judge the ideas faulty and the innovations as ineffective in achieving goals, but the force and dynamism of the institutional development cannot be denied. By 1925, however, a curious situation had developed. Essentially, the large institution, built for the ages, remote from population and teaching centers, was bereft of rationales. The only major rationale left was relief for hard-pressed families of the retarded, and if this rationale had been taken seriously it would have called either for community services, and/or for specialized and dispersed residential centers of a more humanizing character, and nearer to population centers. Furthermore, the institutions were so crowded that it might have taken a decade without any admissions at all to reduce residents to an appropriate number.

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If the field had continued to evolve as logically as it had until about 1925, it is clear that community and special residential services would have been developed and institutions of the type we still have with us today would have withered away. However, community services did not develop fast enough, and this is probably one of the major reasons institutions did not change. Why these community services failed to develop is not simple to answer. I propose that four reasons may be paramount:

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1. The professionals had indoctrinated the populace for about 30 years regarding the menace of retardation, and were to continue to assert the unchangeability of intelligence for another 30 years; thus, probably only a prolonged campaign of attitude modification (as finally developed in about 1950) could have secured community services.

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2. Partially because of the pessimism communicated by the workers in the field, the interest of professionals became attracted to the new discoveries and increasing treatment opportunities in the area of mental health. A change in orientation of the National Conference on Charities and Correction reflected and/or contributed toward this trend. One of the organizers of this body in 1874 had been H. B. Wilbur, a pioneer in mental retardation. For almost a half century, the Conference was one of the major meeting grounds between professionals in the field of mental retardation and other professionals and public officials. In 1917, the name was changed to the National Conference of Social Work; it became more of an association for one particular profession rather than a meeting ground and forum for many; and as papers on mental health and hygiene increased in frequency, papers on mental retardation began to diminish and eventually disappear.

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