Article About Mentally Retarded.

Mental Retarded
Research:

Mental retardation is a problem of serious social concern. In view of the large number of persons considered to be mentally retarded, such concern is certainly justified. Using the conventional criterion of 3 per cent of the population, the U.S. President’s Panel on Mental Retardation (1963) estimated that almost 5.5 million children and adults in the United States are mentally retarded. The criterion for mental retardation established in the “Manual on Terminology and Classification in Mental Retardation” (Heber 1959) and adopted by the American Association on Mental Deficiency as well as the Biometrics Branch, National Institute of Mental Health, is that all those at least one standard deviation below the population mean intelligence quotient (IQ) are considered retarded. If one accepts this criterion, and many do not, there are almost 30 million mental retardates in the United States. If the more conservative estimmate is employed, mental retardation is twice as prevalent as blindness, polio, cerebral palsy, and rheumatic heart conditions combined (Doll 1962).

The typical textbook pictures the distribution of intelligence as normal or Gaussian in nature, with approximately the lower 3 percent of the distribution encompassing the mentally retarded. A common class of persons is thus constructed, a class defined by intelligence-test scores below 70. This schema has misled many laymen and students and has subtly influenced the approach of experienced workers in the area. For if one fails to appreciate the arbitrary nature of the cutoff point of 70, it is but a short step to the formulation that all those falling below this point compose a homogeneous class of “subnormals.” Since the conceptual distance between “subnormal” and “abnormal,” with its age-old connotation of disease and defect, is minimal, the final step is to regard retardates as a homogeneous group of defective organisms, immutably different from those persons possessing a higher IQ.

Characteristics of Mental Retardation

Mental retardation characteristics can be classified into three categories: physical, intellectual and behavioral. Children with mental retardation have a slower rate of physical development, however, do not have any specific physical attributes that differentiate them from the rest of the population. They may exhibit conditions like hyponocity, abnormalities of the orofacial parts and unsteady gait. In terms of behavioral characteristics of mental retardation, these children exhibit characteristics such as limited self-control, aggressiveness or self injury. In fact, some people with severe mental retardation characteristics are even found to exhibit.

If we consider the intellectual characteristics, we will find quite a bit of difference between the cognitive and adaptive behavior of mentally retarded children and the rest of the population. To understand both cognitive and adaptive behavioral patterns properly, let's have a look at them individually.
-Researched By: Yanga, Shanee Ann A.