Mental retardation, as a term has fallen out of favour with the politically correct, and it is no longer in general use to describe mental handicap or 'intellectual disability'. The phrase has undoubtedly faded from polite vernacular because of its popular use as an insult. One often encounters the word 'retard' bandied about to entertain; the American comedy 'South Park' makes frequent use, as do comedians and teenagers when they wish to joke or to insult.
To my mind it is a pity when a phrase that is highly useful in terms of its descriptive nature falls out of favour simply because it has been hackneyed into an insult or joke. Ironically our predilection for politically correct terminology may be more a reflection of our own 'intellectual disability'. When language is twisted to fit with our fashions and superficial sensibilities, it's primary objective of communicating the 'truth' of a thing is fundamentally compromised. Although our feelings and delicate sensibilities are perhaps better preserved, the 'truth' and our intellect are no better for the exercise.
The more favourable term of 'intellectual disability' seems empty and less informative. Who amongst us does not have an intellectual disability? Whilst preparing for medical school in the US, part of the pre-med curriculum is a class in Differential Calculus, and one in Organic Chemistry, both of which I had to take twice on account of my own intellectual disability in these particular areas. Whilst I would admit to intellectual disability and indeed I see this disability in each and all of my fellow humans, I would not readily admit to mental retardation, as this implies a process of mental development that has been fundamentally restricted or retarded in an absolute or final sense.
A disability may be overcome; the immobile may become mobile with wheelchairs or crutches, a disability can be remedied by technology, in some instances by willpower alone. However a retardation carries with it an element of finality, and is more suggestive of a problem that cannot be fixed. In many instances the latter is entirely true, and individuals with a form mental retardation will never develop a mental capacity that is in keeping with the majority of their peers. That is not to say that the mentally retarded have not developed in other ways, and have not cultivated other mental and emotional faculties that are superior to those of the majority, this is often the case. It is a well known fact that the blind generally have a more acute sense of hearing than the seeing, a more refined sense of taste and smell and so on.
But here we go again! The ideology of capitalism has so overtaken and consumed the psychology of modern humans that we cannot help but consider the world in entirely materialistic terms. That the seeing have more than the blind is undeniable on a certain level. However this more is merely on the level of the amount or number of faculties. It does not follow that the blind are invariably less well-off or less capable than the seeing. Eşref Armağan is a blind painter, Helen Keller was blind and deaf, Aldous Huxley was blind, Erik Weihenmayer was the first blind person to climb Mount Everest.
In the very act of considering the disabled as dis-abled, in their recognition as special in the context of their disability, we cannot help but reinforce their status as being or having something 'less' than others. In attempting to help, in aspiring towards equality we often create or reinforce the very inequality we are attempting to escape.
When we campaign for 'Gay Marriage' and 'Gay Rights', we reinforce the difference and the distinctions between homo and heterosexuals. We try to accommodate the disabled or the sexual variant, within the limited context of our own limited coordinates for normality, and when we do so we reach the point at which the disabled become truly disabled, and the homosexual becomes the 'sexual deviant'. The problem is not the lack of accommodation, but rather the very coordinates within which we are attempting to accomodate the marginalised within.
Gay marriage is a classical example. I have a gay friend who is entirely against the idea of gay marriage, when I asked him why? He told me frankly: "marriage is a straight thing. Its what straight people do. Gays need to stop trying to be straight, stop trying to make the gay world straight, to live up to some silly straight ideal, like crippled people who want to walk. We are not cripples. Let straight people have their weddings and marriages and let Gays find there own thing!"
Ever since hearing that, I have been entirely against gay marriage.
We demand equality, and yet equality in the modern world is a concept that has been materialised and consumed by our capitalist psychology. Women should have the same rights as men, disabled should have the same rights and access to services as the able. Whist these assertions may have some merit, they have become entirely materialised in the sense that the amount, the number and the kind of rights loose relevance and relative importance within the our materialised notion of equality itself. The concept 'equality' has effectively distorted the distinction between the able and the unable and between men and women, between gay and straight. In this sense equality has become the new inequality, the new sexism and the new racism and those who shout loudest and demmand it most voiciferously are often the new abusers.
We encounter the consequence of this when we consider the feminist movement and how women are presently brutalised and abused by the very concept of equality itself, by the loss of essential and fundamental distinctions between men and women, by the loss of respect for women and for sexuality in general. Women are encouraged to work in positions and roles that are 'equal' to men. They are entitled to equal pay and (outside of the small allowance of maternity-leave) they are expected to function within the work environment on a par with their males counterparts.
This equality is a step backwards a step downwards for most women. Men for example are not encouraged to be equal to women, they are not encouraged to take the same maternity leave, they are not encouraged to feel the same emotions that a woman does when she leaves her children at the creche or the playschool. Conversely women are encouraged towards an equality that is almost entirely male and materially defined. Women are encouraged to work, to experience and to feel the same emotions as men, they are encouraged to stop being women and start being either men or the playthings of men. This is the new sexism the new form of oppression and it is an inequality and abuse that is born out of our contemporary material notions of equality.
When a woman leaves her children at the creche, there is an entirely different series of emotional consequences that she must experience as compared to her male counterpart. The evidence for these experiences is plain in the context of her interface with modern medicine, of her presentations and those presentations with her 'sick' children' to the doctor.
From the perspective of evolutionary biology the psychological basis of the maternal attachment to offspring is entirely different to that of the paternal. We know this to be true on a deeply personal level, in the distinction between the relationships we share with our mothers and those we share with our fathers. Historically and indeed as evidenced in most mammals, whilst the offspring are unable to fend for themselves, it is the male who must leave the nest to hunt and gather whilst the female cares for the young. It is to the female that the newborn initially attaches itself both physically and psychologically, because she provides for immediate needs whilst the father provides for those needs that are more distant and more long term. If one interferes with this bond or this attachment, if one removes the child from the mother during this period of intimate physical and psychological attachment, significant anxiety is experienced by both mother and child. Conversely the father is entirely unaffected by separation anxiety, unless he is made aware of it, through a recognition its consequences upon both mother and child. In this instance he is instructed to bring the child to the doctor, and often brings a list of symptoms in case he forgets what is supposedly worng with the 'sick' child.
In General practice a significant portion of the income of any practice is derived from the anxiety of working mothers, their guilt at having to 'abandon' their children with strangers, and the psychological consequence of disrupting the natural process of maternal engagement with her children. This is manifest in several forms; Mothers present to family doctors far more often than fathers, mothers suffer ill-health far more than fathers. In many respects ill-health and disease are the only legitimate means for a mother to escape from the rat-race and spend time bonding with their infants. Ill-health provides mothers with the chance to be mothers, and in this sense society encourages ill-health in both mothers and children alike.
In Ireland various estimates at the inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics, put the figure at somewhere in the region of 80%. That is to say that in 80% of cases an antibiotic is prescribed when it is not needed. There are several reasons for this; the capitalist structure of medicine means that most working mothers must pay a consultation fee to see a doctor, and in this sense, to come away from the encounter empty handed, or without an acceptable 'medical diagnosis' that will validate maternal anxiety, makes for risky medicine.
In most cases of by-proxy maternal anxiety (well child whom mother believes to be ill) the illness or 'infection' has already been diagnosed by the mother or another lay-person, concerned relative or creche worker, long before the mother presents to the doctor. All that is required of the doctor is to validate the mothers concerns, to externalise both the maternal anxiety and the probable unhappiness of the child, in the form of an 'antibiotic for a week'; after which the anxiety and unhappiness will have passed or morphed into a different medical or non medical form.
Ironically there is enormous pressure and many millions are spent (with good reason) to try and prevent the prescribing of unnecessary antibiotics. However, because of our suppression of the true nature of the illness (in this instance maternal anxiety), because the mother is actually seeking validation of her maternal instinct, of her role as a mother, of her anxiety and upset at abandoning her children; the antibiotic in modern western society has assumed an entirely different social and psychological role. Although it is not being prescribed appropriately, it is entirely necessary for an entirely different sublimated purpose. That purpose is the treatment of maternal anxiety in the only manner that is socially acceptable.
It is for this reason that all campaigns to encourage appropriate use of antibiotics are doomed to failure from the very outset, and it is for this reason that those campaigns are even supported by the manufacturers of the antibiotics themselves. The various better prescribing campaigns serve no purpose other than to increase the maternal anxiety, for the mother must now wonder if indeed she has administered poison to her child and if indeed she is contributing to the 'antibiotic-resistance' that is killing other children the world over.
The medicalisation of the dysfunctioning family does not stop at antibiotics, it has become an entire industry. A myriad of illness have been created to explain maternal anxiety, from food allergies, intolerances, sensitivities, to behavioural and intellectual disabilities; as anxious mothers proceed down these roads, countless 'experts' and charlatans are waiting to relieve the mother of the fruits of her labour, whilst none have the courage to suggest the unthinkable, that it is her labour that is the primary cause of the disease itself.
In the context of paediatrics, a significant portion of the 'illness' ascribed to children is a consequence of their experience of abnormal relations with their parents. Dyslexia for example is almost entirely a myth that has arisen as both a real and an imagined consequence of 'equality' and consequent dysfunction of the family unit. Because both parents are 'equal' working mothers have no time to address their own illiteracy and intellectual disability. Ireland presently boasts one of the lowest adult literacy levels in the developed world.(See Irish Times Article this week)
Mothers are not only deprived of the time to help their children with their intellectual development, but have neither the time nor the inclination to help themselves. As a consequence, much of the 'dyslexia' in Ireland is merely the manifest form of a willful parental illiteracy, one that is simply and directly passed from parents to children.
In Ireland the diagnosis of dyslexia is not only entirely disproportionate to its reality as a condition, but it is actively encouraged by the state, in that children (or parents) who can afford to purchase the diagnosis (most dyslexia is diagnosed by privately paid psychologists) will then be entitled to a plethora of 'special needs' assistance, and additional help in exams such as readers for papers and different marking structures etc. There are numerous programs for dyslexic students to gain access to third level institutions, and whilst all of these special encouragements towards 'equality' might be considered by some as a good thing, in many if not most cases the initial diagnosis is at best questionable, and the labelling of a child as dyslexic may do them as much good as having the word 'retarded' tattooed across their forehead.
When a diagnosis of dyslexia is to be made if the literacy and the functional parenting skills of both parents were to be taken into consideration, the 'diagnosis' would neither be as easily nor as frequently applied.
The pathological 'equality' of working mothers is not only evident in 'dyslexia' but across the medical and psychological spectrum. Frequently diagnoses are applied to children that are entirely the result of a dysfunctional family unit, and of wholly inadequate parenting. In the context of a modern capitalist society the emphasis is upon; work, productivity, consumption, spending, growth etc. School's themselves have gotten in on the act and presently, despite the ethereal notion of 'free education', Irish schools seem to derive a an almost sadistic pleasure in the pain they impose upon parents and especially mothers.
For example there is no psychological, material, health or educational benefit to be derived from the wearing of a school uniform that costs several hundred euros. There is no educational benefit to be derived from the purchase of several hundreds of euros in school books each year. For the especially anally- retentive school board: grey school pants/skirt, a white shirt, and a sweater can be purchased at a fraction of the cost of the typical uniform, that must be purchased from a specialised store.
The fundamentals of mathematics have remained unchanged since Pythagoras and as such there is no need for new books to be purchased each year, a simple book by-back or rental scheme would do away with this abuse forever. The latest and most repugnant of these socially sanctioned school-scams is the mandatory purchase of I-pads and Kindles etc etc, to the tune of several hundred euros. All of these entirely unnecessary abuses are perpetrated upon parents by schools in the guise of 'progress' and in the interest of the child etc..., when in reality they are a consequence of financial incentives and arrangements between manufacturers, publishers and schools. Most of the schools and school boards who are introducing mandatory ipads to their pupils are in receipt of sweetheart deals where teachers get them free, and schools are rewarded in other unpublished ways.
In Ireland when one wishes to find child abuse one merely has to look at the institutions who ostensibly advertise the opposite, all of this compels mothers to work to pay for these abuses and thence to the doctor to misdiagnose and prescribe for these abuses.
This morning whilst driving through Rush on my way to work, I stopped at a traffic light and noticed that a man on the footpath stopped walking and began staring at me with a mixed expression of anger and suspicion. I looked away and looked back (as one does) and yet the man continued to stare directly at me, as though I had just driven over his dog. My immediate reaction was one of irritation, 'what the hell is that feckin eegit starring at?' I thought, however as soon as I had finished the thought, I felt a lump in my throat as I realised that the man was clearly 'intellectually disabled', there is a centre in Rush called Prosper Fingal which provides activities and training for the disabled and this man was on his way there. When the lights changed and I drove on, I wondered if what had just occurred was a microcosm of what must occur if I am to achieve happiness and overcome my present intellectual disability; my anger at humanity, at the state of our society and the state of our world, if I am to accept it all with stoic complacency. Rather than be annoyed at myself and my fellow man for behaving stupidly, perhaps I must simply come to the realisation that humanity is (in its entirety) 'mentally retarded', that it is incapable of nothing more than our present social construct. That we might imagine a better world, but we lack the intellectual capacity to do much more than stare into the void, and continue to dream about it.
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