MENTAL HANDICAP VOL. 11 JUNE 1983

Mentally handicapped man seeks public oftice

Sir - A mentally handicapped man was reported in the Chicago Tribune to be running for the Boulder City Council. Officials in Colorado of an association for the mentally handicapped said that he was the first “identilied mentally retarded person” in the United States to seek public office. The man, Charlie Dieterle, aged 31, said he wanted to gain office so that he could prove “handicapped people are real people”.

Charlie was an orphan and has spent most of his life in mental handicap institutions, but he now lives in a small apartment and finds employment working as a dishwasher, janitor, or maintenance man. He got on the electoral roll in 1972 and has attended most of the council meetings in Boulder. In 1980 Charlie was an observer at the Democratic National Convention and says that one of the most memorable moments of his life was when he met Senator Edward Kennedy.

Charlie Dieterle says: ‘‘I feel politics means a lot to me. I listen to the news very strongly. Once it sinks in I know what’s going on.” He says that his fight for personal independence started his interest in the political rights of handi- capped people. He is the President of the Colorado branch of the organisation “People First”, which advocates equal rights for the handicapped. Although mentally handicapped himself he is said to contact city officials and council members frequently about physical barriers to people in wheelchairs. Charlie admits he has trouble reading but, he said, “I can participate in a meeting. I can listen and I can talk”.

N.B. This is not a verbatim report. It has been “scrambled” from the Chicago Tribune of Monday September 28th, 1981 kindly sent to me by Mrs. Ludmilla Coven of Glencoe, Illinois. STANLEY E. K. HEWITT, 1 Oxney Place, Peasedown St. John, Nr. Bath, Avon.

Computerised register of mentally handicapped people

Sir - In Doncaster District Health Authority we are about to embark on the development of a computerised register for mentally handicapped individuals in the district. In discussing the use of a computerised system it is apparent that one of the major costs involved is the development of the software. We would like to ask if any of your readers has developed such a system, and if any infor- mation relating to it including a copy of the case register, could be passed to us. We are mainly concerned with using a micro-computer if at all possible. Thank you for your help.

ROGER HUTCHINSON, Clinical Psychologist, MICHAEL BONE, Administrator for Mental Handicap Services, St. Catherine’s Hospital, Doncaster.

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Heviews

Training of the developmentally handicapped adult: A practical guide to habilitation Roy I. Brown, E. Anne Hughson Springfield, Illinois: Charles C . Thomas, 1980 Hbk $14.75 199pp

Working with people who are hard to teach means that teaching practices must be more effective. However, those teach- ing practices will be more widely applic- able. Thus, a book about rehabilitation (or habilitation), if it is to be a teaching aid, should:

be clearly laid out; have plenty of examples; include diagrams, pictures, and graphs which are well-integrated with the text, and clearly labelled and explained; state its general principles clearly, and the examples given to illustrate these principles should show how principle and specific examples are related. Furthermore, if a book addresses itself

to the “rehabilitation practitioner” it must also meet even more stringent criteria since it will be competing with the urgent task of “getting on with the job”.

The authors present a model for rehabilitation which is in accordance with generally accepted principles, and put forward a plan of decreasing structure as the client progresses. However, the book is not clearly laid out and in the early pages, where it should be tightly struc- tured, it rambles. The examples are there, but are not clearly presented. The under- lying principles which they are supposed to illustrate are not clearly drawn. Dia- grams, pictures, and charts are used, but are often pages away from the relevant text, are inadequately labelled, and are often not explained at all.

There are largely irrelevant chapters, including Prevalence and Causation, and the diagram on page 23 labelled “An interacting constellation of problems in developmental handicaps” indicates some of the major difficulties. The level at which intervention can occur pops up within the text, entitled “Genetic abnor- malities”. The text may or may not be relevant to the figure which from the previous page is supposed to indicate “multiple causation and complication” - I admit to not understanding either text or diagram. It seems that the authors’ fav-

ourite method of describing complication is to make both text and diagram incom- prehensible, thereby practically demon- strating how complicated it must be.

All this obscures the point that the authors do know their subject, and do present a model which could help the implementation and design of (re)habili- tation programmes.

The authors’ final comment, “Research and practice must always be interpreted in meaninghl language”, is one which they should have remembered whilst writing the book.

KEVIN GILLESPIE

Experimenting with Social Change: an interpretive history of the Southern Alberta Corn Serv project. Toronto: NIMR, 1982 Pbk $10.50 225pp

Do you aim to develop a local and comprehensive service for people who are mentally handicapped? If so, sooner or later, service coordination will become a major concern. At individual client level, how do you ensure that a handicapped person has access to whatever services are appropriate to meet his needs? At organisational level, how do you ensure collaboration between services which are hnded and managed separately, each jealously guarding its own autonomy?

In 1971, the Canadian Association for the Mentally Retarded (CAMR) adopted a plan to create Comprehensive Community Service Systems (Com Serv), embodying coordination at both individual and systems levels. During the early 1 9 7 0 ’ ~ ~ key works relevant to the concept of comprehensive community services were published by the National Institute on Mental Retardation in Toronto: Wolfensberger’s The Principle of Normalisation in Human Services, 1972; The Third Stage in the Evolution of Voluntary Associations for the Mentally Retarded, 1973; Citizen Advocacy (with Zauha), 1973; and Program Analysis of Service Systems (with Glenn), 1975.

T o test the CAMR plan in practice, proposals for experimental and demon- stration projects were invited. This book tells the story of the first project and some important lessons which were learned.

The first two chapters set the scene and the last chapter reviews the main themes emerging from this Herculean effort at complex social change. The rest of the chapters give a blow by blow account of the project’s progress.

Despite differences in service patterns between Canada and Britain, there is much to be learned from those who have travelled the road towards comprehensive and local services before.

CHRIS GATHERCOLE

@ 1983 British institute of Mental Handicap 84