This paper argues that the clinical perspective on mental handicap which underpins most research and professional practice in the field does not help us to explain or understand how mentally handicapped people are valued and treated in their day-to-day dealings with others. Using material gathered in interviews with the parents of mentally handicapped children, the paper plots the unfolding of the idea of subnormality and traces the gradual transition in the child's status as he drifts from normal baby to handicapped infant. It shows how subnormality emerges as a social state, which can be defined in terms of the qualities and capacities which are ascribed to or withheld from mentally handicapped people. In this sense, it is suggested that the social roles allocated to mentally handicapped people are created and shaped from the social meanings imputed to the diagnosis.
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References
1.
Accepted, 26.11.76. In this paper I shall use the term `subnormality' to mean `severe subnormality' as defined in the Mental Health Act 1959 and to refer to the legal and clinical status of mentally handicapped people. I shall use the term `mentally handicapped' to refer to the social status granted to people who have been ascertained `severely subnormal'.
2.
Also, Bernard Farber , `Family Organisation and Crisis: Maintenance of Integration in Families with a Severely Retarded Child', op cit., Vol. 25 No. 1, 1960.
3.
See, for example, Walter B. Jaehnig, `Mentally Handicapped Children and their Families', Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Department of Sociology, University of Essex, 1974.
4.
See, for example, Michael Bayley , Mental Handicap and Community Care, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul , 1973.
5.
See, for example, Pauline Morris , Put Away, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul , 1969 including Introduction by Peter Townsend.
6.
see G. Pearson , The Deviant Imagination, London, Macmillan , 1975.
7.
See, for example, Stephen Kew , Handicap and Family Crisis, London, Pitman , 1975.
8.
For a discussion of this dilemma see Sheila Hewett , The Family and the Handicapped Child, London, George Allen and Unwin Ltd. , 1970 Chapter 4 and pp. 202-207.
9.
also Mary Sheridan , The Handicapped Child and his Home, London, National Children's Home , 1965.
10.
For a study of the different roles played and statuses held by mentally handicapped people in the community see Jane R. Mercer , Labelling the Mentally Retarded, Berkeley, University of California Press Limited , 1973.
11.
See R. B. Edgerton , The Cloak of Competence: Stigma in the Lives of the Mentally Retarded, Berkeley, University of California Press Limited , 1967.
12.
See Eliot Freidson , Profession of Medicine: A Study in the Sociology of Applied Knowledge, New York, Dodd Mead and Company , 1970.
13.
See Fred Davis , Passage Through Crisis, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill , 1963, p. 179.
14.
The research was carried out from the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex and funded by the D.H.S.S. The project was conducted by Walter B. Jaehnig, assisted by myself, under the direction of Professor Peter Townsend.
15.
All names are, of course, pseudonyms. The same name is used to refer to the same family throughout.
16.
It may be noted, nevertheless, that in the cases of three other mongol children in the survey a diagnosis was not made at the time of delivery but from four to sixteen months later. For a discussion of difficulties and delays in the diagnosis of mongolism see E. R. Kramm , Families of Mongoloid Children (HEW Children's Bureau Publication No. 401) Washington D.C.: US Government Printing Office , 1963.
17.
See Howard S. Becker and Anselm Strauss , `Careers, Personality and Adult Socialization' , American Journal of Sociology, 62, 1956, 253-263 .
18.
For a detailed discussion of the temporal foundations of experience, and of the ways in which the past may be re-interpreted in the light of present experiences, see Alfred Schutz , The Phenomenology of the Social World, London, Heinemann , 1972.
19.
A. G. Davis and P. M. Strong , `Aren't Children Wonderful—A Study of the Allocation of Identity in Development Assessment' in Margaret Stacey (ed.), The Sociology of the NHS Sociological Review Monograph 22, University of Keele , March, 1976.
20.
see Campaign for the Mentally Handicapped, Normnalisation?, Discussion Paper No. 3, 96 Portland Place, London .
21.
See Fred Davis , `Uncertainty in Medical Prognosis: Clinical and Functional' , American Journal of Sociology, 66, 1960, p. 41-47 .
22.
also finds that in cases of cystic fibrosis `diagnosis... required considerable parental effort to effect', p. 27.
23.
Elaine Cumming and John Cumming , Closed Ranks, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press , 1957 observe that the cut-off between the mentally ill and the mentally well in the eyes of the lay population seems to occur as soon as behaviour becomes non-normative and unpredictable.
24.
H. Garfinkel , `Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies' , American Journal of Sociology, 61, 1956, p. 420-424 .
25.
Fred Davis , Passage Through Crisis, op cit., p. 11.
26.
The analysis presented in this paper and concluded in this section contrasts sharply with the point of view put forward by Margaret Voysey , A Constant Burden, Routledge and Kegan Paul , 1975. She writes that `what parents say about their child may reflect less their own constructions than the amputations of others, notably doctors, and especially once a formal diagnosis has been made' (p. 36). And, she adds, `... definitions of his condition in terms of the three dimensions of onset, diagnosis and prognosis may be initially and ultimately those of doctors. It is they who act to provide the basic rules in terms of which parents' evaluations of their child's behaviour must then make sense' (p. 39). I have sought to show that subnormality, as a social status, is not foisted on children by the arbitrary decision of professional diagnosticians.
