num_pages: 392
description: Half-wits dunces dullards and idiots: though often teased and tormented the feebleminded were once a part of the community cared for and protected by family and community members. But in the decade of the 1840s a group of American physicians and reformers began to view mental retardation as a social problem requiring public intervention. For the next century and a half social science and medical professionals constructed meanings of mental retardation at the same time incarcerating hundreds of thousands of Americans in institutions and special schools. James W. Trent uses public documents private letters investigative reports and rare photographs to explore our changing perceptions of feeble minds. From local family matter to state and social problem constructions of mental retardation represent a history of ideas techniques and tools. Trent contends that the economic vulnerability of mentally retarded people and their families more than the claims made for their intellectual or social limitations has determined their institutional treatment. He finds that the focus on technical and usually psychomedical interpretations of mental retardation has led to a general ignorance of the maldistribution of resources status and power so evident in the lives of the retarded. Superintendents social welfare agents IQ testers and sterlizers have utilized these psychological and medical paradigms to insure their own social privilege and professional legitimacy. Rather than simply moving from care to control  state schools have made care an effective and integral part of control. In analyzing the current policy of deinstitutionalization Trent concludes it has been more successful in dispersing disabled citizens than in integrating them into American communities. Inventing the Feeble Mind powerfully shatters conventional understandings of mental retardation. It is essential reading for social workers psychologists historians sociologists educator
language: English
title: Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Intellectual Disability in the United States
publisher: Oxford University Press