Central government has a long-standing interest in the co-ordination of health and welfare resources: an interest which produced the Hospital Plan of 1962 and the complementary long-term plans of local authority health and welfare departments in 1963; which lay behind the re-organisation of Whitehall departments in 1968 and the creation of a single ministry – the Department of Health and Social Security – with responsibility for all health and personal social services; and which was further advanced following the Seebohm Report by the creation of unified social services departments by the 1970 Social Services Act.
Subsequently, the re-organisation of local government and the NHS opened up new opportunities for closer liaison and greater co-operation by organising the new health and local authorities into matching areas of administration; by putting a statutory obligation on health authorities and their corresponding local authorities to collaborate so as to secure the health and welfare of the people of their areas; and by establishing the machinery for collaboration at the local level in the form of joint consultative committees and their supporting teams of officers.
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.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.