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Such an approach requires large amounts of money and expertise, and some states have begun to supply both In 1966 Massachusetts passed the Com munity Mental Health Act, which se up regional boards to evaluate need; and plan facilities. Says Dr. Milton Greenblatt, the state's commissioner o mental health: "We're trying to phase down the institutions and close the snake pits." One large facility has been closed while the patient load at other, has been reduced. The Hathorne State School, a new center serving a region with a population of 900,000, provide in-and outpatient services, day care anc community residences.
Name Game. Nebraska, Georgia and Illinois have built community facilities where the retarded who continue to live at home can be helped. No other state has gone as far as California, which in 1971 created a network of comprehensive medical and educational facilities designed to supply a complete range of services for some 200,000 retarded. These centers provide diagnosis and continued counseling at no cost, and guide parents to the best available training programs. They also help to find foster homes for children whose parents cannot care for them.
Baltimore's John F. Kennedy Institute for Habilitation of the Mentally and Physically Handicapped Child, one of 27 university-affiliated research facilities created under a 1966 federal law, brings together pediatricians, psychiatrists, speech and hearing specialists. The institute puts children through complete physical and psychological examinations and tests for learning and perceptual disabilities before staff members meet with parents to set what Dr. Robert Haslam, the institute's director, calls "realistic goals for their habilita-tion." It also provides in-and outpatient services for 140 children. Similar programs are carried out at the Developmental Evaluation Clinic at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston, whose director. Dr. Allen Crocker, believes that almost every retarded child can be helped in some way. He spends much of his time training parents to accept the retarded as human beings. Parents must also learn not to give up hope. Joseph and Jean Paulsen of Chicago were told that their son Donny would never sit up or walk, let alone go to school. They were urged to put him in an institution. Instead the Paulsens kept him home and worked with him themselves so that Donny, 15, now not only walks, but dresses and feeds himself. Even mongoloids, once written off as hopeless cases, can be trained or educated to some degree.
Doctors at the Fairview State Hospital in Costa Mesa, Calif., have adapted a musical teaching method to help develop language skills. In one exercise, the youngsters sit in a circle and chant.
"Names, names, what's your name?" As they do, they pass a drum from hand to hand and each tries to say his name while beating out its syllables. Promising results are also being obtained with a behaviorist approach that does not concern itself with the cause of a child's disability or with traditional IQ measurements. It merely rewards positive responses from the child to any kind of lesson. The system seems to work with tokens that the children recognize as symbols of success. The point is to get the child accustomed to learning what he can, whether it is tying shoelaces or writing his name.