The Slow Ones

"I am the mother," began the ad in a Manhattan newspaper, "of a gentle and lovable child whom the doctors term hopelessly feebleminded. My son is without playmates, without education of any kind. Surely there must be other parents like myself. Where are you? Let's band together and do something for our children." Summoned by this appeal, a determined band of parents in 1949 founded the New York State Association for the Help of Retarded Children to strengthen and direct their demands for better clinics and training schools for feeble-minded children. A new book growing out of the association's work, Retarded Children Can Be Helped (Channel Press; $5), by LIFE Reporter Maya Pines and Photographer Cornell Capa, describes arid illustrates the latest techniques that can help two-thirds or more of retarded children to become poised, self-supporting adults.

Each year some 120,000 mentally retarded children are born in the U.S., the victims of brain injury, prenatal diseases in the mother, or other causes not fully understood. In all the U.S. there are only about 20 centers, such as the pioneering clinic at Manhattan's Flower-Fifth Avenue hospital, where retarded children may get examinations and expert judgment of their possibilities for mental development. Parents fortunate enough to find such a clinic may use its findings to help them decide whether to keep their child at home (as 95% do) or send him to an institution. In some cases the clinics discover children whose seeming retardation stems from emotional problems rather than defective brains; these require entirely different treatment from the truly feebleminded. Parents are assured that so far as medicine knows, they are in no way to blame for the biological accident that produced a defective child.

Basic Skills. For upper-level retarded children (with IQs from 51 to 80) who have no emotional or physical disabilities, the public schools in many cities now provide special classes. There the slow learners acquire such basic skills as reading, arithmetic, telling time, using the telephone, handling money. With patient training, most of these youngsters may eventually find jobs. Some schools teach their girl students how to put on lipstick and dress attractively; boys learn how to call a girl for a date, and small groups, after careful instruction, venture out to dine in restaurants. For the "trainables," with IQs of 30 to 50, some of whom must be shown how to tie their shoes or turn on a light, the outlook is for slower progress; most must spend the rest of their days under guardianship, and work, if at all, in "sheltered" industries beside others of their kind.

Of the state-supported training schools, Reporter Pines found, none has shown a brighter record of success than Connecticut's Southbury Training School. There some 1,700 boys and girls live in cottage-style dormitories under the supervision of house mothers and fathers. The younger students study the three Rs, while the older ones may take training in any of 57 trades, from barbering to printing, that lie within their capabilities. Restrictions are at a minimum, and athletic teams from the school compete with those from nearby high schools. In part because of such successful social training, most of Southbury's "educable" students and a high 42% of the duller trainables eventually qualify for jobs outside the school.

Hope from Therapy. For the mentally retarded who also have deep-rooted emotional problems, the outlook for a useful, self-sufficient life is less bright. But psychiatrists are finding that the mentally, deficient who are also neurotic or psychotic may respond to psychotherapy. Counseling and Psychotherapy with the Mentally Retarded (Free Press; $7.50), edited by Psychologists Chalmers Stacey and Manfred F. DeMartino, reports encouraging successes in the treatment of patients who as recently as ten years ago would have been written off as hopeless.

Mental defectives become neurotic or psychotic for the same reasons as anyone else: they experience feelings of guilt, fear or loneliness, mixed emotions of love and hate toward their parents, and often enough with good cause suffer a profound sense of rejection, e.g., when they compete unsuccessfully with normal brothers and sisters for parental love. When their conflicts become overpowering, they tend to withdraw into schizophrenia, or become violently aggressive.

Similarities fade when treatment begins. Psychoanalysis, with its demand for effective communication between doctor and patient, has only limited value among the retarded (although the interpretation of dreams is often useful). More effective: the psychodrama, where the patients act out their fantasies; play therapy, where the choice of games and playthings may reveal hidden conflicts; group therapy, where shared misery becomes less intolerable. The increasing weight of evidence now indicates that retarded patients show as good a recovery rate under treatment as do their brighter fellow patients.

In some cases the intelligence of retarded patients seemed to improve under psychotherapy. However, most researchers agree that in such cases, the patient's conflicts had prevented him previously from using his full mentality. By easing such conflicts, psychotherapy can help give useful lives to patients otherwise doomed to sit out their years in the dark corners of mental hospitals.

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