Better services for the mentally handicapped / presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Social Services and the Secretary of State for Wales by command of Her Majesty, June 1971.
- Department of Health and Social Security
- Date:
- 1971
Licence: Open Government Licence
Credit: Better services for the mentally handicapped / presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Social Services and the Secretary of State for Wales by command of Her Majesty, June 1971. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![INTRODUCTION 1. There are probably about 120,000 people in England and Wales who are severely mentally handicapped, of whom about 50,000 are children. Many more are mildly mentally handicapped. 2. What does this mean? What special help is needed for these people and their families? What is done for them at present, and what ought to be done in future? Why has this Government, like the previous Government, given special priority to developing services for the mentally handicapped, and what does this entail? 3. This paper deals with these questions. Its main objects are: (i) To explain why the present services need to be extended and improved, and the shift in emphasis from care in hospital to care in the community accelerated. (ii) To invite greater sympathy and tolerance on the part of the public for the mentally handicapped in their own local communities, and to stress the importance of the help they can give through voluntary Services. (iii) To give local authorities and hospital authorities guidance on the lines on which the Government wish their services to develop. (iv) To describe the programmes of improvement and development which have been started, and what more needs to be done. 4. The term “ mental handicap ” is used throughout this paper. Various other terms are used, here and in other countries, with the same meaning. “Mental deficiency” used to be the statutory term in England and Wales and still is in Scotland. In England and Wales the present statutory terms are “ subnormality”” and “severe subnormality ’, which together cover the conditions for which the term “ mental handicap ” is used in this paper. The term “mental retardation” is used in the United States and has also been adopted by the World Health Organisation with the sub-classifications “mild”, “moderate”, “severe” and “profound”; the last three of these together are broadly equivalent to the term “severe mental handicap” used in this paper. “Mental handicap” is used in preference to any of the alternative terms because this helps to emphasise that our attitude should be the same as to other types of handicap, i.e., to prevent it whenever possible, to assess it adequately when it occurs, and to do everything possible to alleviate its severity and compensate for its effects. 5. Description of our present services in Chapter 4 inevitably highlights their deficiencies. It needs to be made clear at the outset that this implies no criticism of the hospital or local authority staff who are concerned with the day-to-day care of the mentally handicapped in hospital or elsewhere. On the contrary, they, with the mentally handicapped themselves and their families, bear the brunt of these deficiencies. 6. The nurses, many working in overcrowded and understaffed hospital wards, are giving devoted personal service to their patients. We look to them with confidence to improve the quality of their patients’ daily life when the means of doing so are put into their hands. ]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b32230473_0007.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
