Collection: Documents - Catalog Card

EXCERPT: It is against this unfavorable background that in the most recent years a major effort is being made to arrive at a radically different legal basis for safeguarding the well-being of the mentally retarded and their families, with due consideration to the interests of society. Indeed, this new effort is a complete departure from the previous formulation of "the State versus the mentally retarded", recognizing that the well-being of the State is dependent on the well-being of all its citizens, no matter how gifted or how limited, how healthy or how disabled. Much of the initiative and the force behind this has come, nationally and internationally, from the movement beginning in the late 1940s by parents of the mentally retarded in countries around the world....