Mental
Retardation
346 - Psychology of Exceptional
Children
(1-29-15)
The "discovery" of the mentally retarded
Mental retardation, intellectual disability, cognitive impairment: these terms all refer to one of the oldest recognized concepts of exceptionality in Western culture. These were also one of the first basic differentiations recovered by Western civilizations after the "dark ages." Despite this antiquity, many would argue that the concept, the population thought of as mentally challenged today is substantially different from the population historically seen as different in this manner; and that the majority of children classified as mentally retarded today would probably never have been perceived as such during much of our history.
A comment on terminology:
Many of the terms that professionals use to discuss exceptionality eventually find their way into the popular vocabulary as insults to be thrown at your siblings and others who irritate us. There was a time when "idiot", "imbecile", "moron" were clinical terms; these rapidly became pejorative; and were replaced with "new", "neutral" phrases, such as "mental defective", which in turn became a term of insult; and was replaced with "mental retardation." Then "MR" acquired negative connotations and newer terms still, such as "developmental disability" were suggest as more acceptable labels. A number of years ago, after lecturing on mental retardation, a student politely brought to my attention the recommendations for labels that were less offensive, such as "developmentally disabled." I listened with some sympathy to her comments but had already heard on the playgrounds of Bloomington-Normal, one child shout at another: "You DD!" The current move is to replace MR with "intellectual disability", both are descriptive but the older term is now viewed as offensive and the newer term more neutral. I believe it will take more than just cleaning up our language every generation or so to really affect our attitudes towards those who are cognitively different than most of us.
WISC-V
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