MENTALLY RETARDED: WHO ARE THEY?
By Anne Rose-Pierce
I am writing to express
my disquiet over the scheduled executions of many disabled
defendants. I have worked in both residential and vocational
settings providing services for adults with disabilities for the
last thirteen years. I worked at Por City Development Center for
almost 10 years, starting as a Production Supervisor, and
advancing to Program Manager. During that time I also worked for
two years at a Saturday respite center for children and adults
with disabilities who lived with their families, and another
three years as the weekend staff at a group home for 5 adult
males. I have worked with people whose degree of retardation
varied from profound to mild.
Disabled adults have personalities, interests and lifestyles as
varied as any other segment of the population. They also have the
ability to learn, but in my experience, their learning process is
slower than the average adult. Tasks often have to be broken down
into very small steps, and repeated many times in order for our
clients to master them. I have also noticed that the concepts
most adults have been to internalize from our own experiences,
what we read, and what we see around us, must be taught to adults
with disabilities in the same way physical tasks are taught. They
often accept what they see on the surface, and think in
absolutes. I will provide examples from my experiences as a
professional in the field to illustrate the way people with
mental retardation learn.
First, I would like to discuss I.Q. An average I.Q. score is 100.
A score above 130 is considered genius, while a person with a
score below 70 is classified retarded. 30 points below average,
is all it takes to be disabled. Johnny
Paul Penry's
I.Q. is another 20 points below that. He is not slow, backwoods,
or uneducated, he is retarded. His learning process is very
similar to the people whose stories I am going to share with you.
Mr A.
My mother became terminally ill my first year at Port City. I was
on the work floor when my father called to tell I needed to come
home immediately. One of the clients, Mr A. noticed that I was crying when I
hung up the phone. He came over to me and asked what was wrong. I
told him, and he said that he would pray for her. I returned to
work about a week after my mother died. Mr A. came up to me at
morning break and asked how my mother was. I told him that she
has died, and he blurted out, "But, I prayed for her!"
I explained the best I could that God does not always answer our
prayers in the way we think he will.
Mr B.
I had been at Port City about 5 years, when one of our clients
died suddently, in her sleep. We held a group meeting to let her
co-workers know about her death. Several clients commented on
things they remembered about her, or how much they missed her. It
was nearly time to go home, so we announced that there was time
for one more person to speak. Mr B. raised his hands, and said,
"We'll be getting a new client for Port City pretty soon
then, won't we?" In a world where the waiting list for
services is hundreds of people long, the loss of one client means
nothing more than that someone new will replace them.
Mr C.
Mr C's parents had taught him to dress neatly, so that he looked
like a young man who worked in a print shop or similiar casual
office setting. He was able to ride our city busses
independently, and hold rational if short conversations. That
combined with his appearance made him appear to be in the
"high-functioning" range, if no normal. Just how great
an illusion that was became very clear one day during lunch
break. He and his girlfriend were talking about their future. He
said that they were going to live on a ranch, and raise
"french fries" and "waterlogs".
Miss D.
Miss D. expected nothing lesss than perfection in her work. She
reacted poorly when staff pointed out any mistakes that she might
make. Her reactions varied from a yell that was loud and
wordless, to self-abuse. Several staff had spent extra time with
her, trying to help her understand that it was OK to make
mistakes. We would explain that everyone messes up at times, that
people learned from their errors, that what counted at Port City
was our workers willingness to fix their mistakes and so on. None
of our conversations with her seemed to help lessen her
self-reproach over her errors. I finally decided to try something
a little more concrete. As Program Manager, it was my
responsability to keep progress notes on our clients. Each one
had a chart that I wrote in. Of I wrote something incorrectly, I
could not erase, I had to draw one line through it, re-write it,
and initial that line. I began calling Miss D. into my office
each time I made a mistake, and showing it to her. She did not
seem to beleive that I had really made a mistake the first time I
tried it, but I kept showing her the page until she said,
"Anne made a mistake." She would mention it again
whenever she saw me at break or lunch, and it looked as if she
was getting the idea. She also seemed to enjoy the extra
attention, and her reactions to her own mistakes became much less
severe within a few months.
Mr E.
Mr E. walked in my office one day, flopped down in my guest
chair, and burst out, "My mother doesn't listen to me".
I responded, "Nobody's mother listens to them", then
asked if there was something specific that was bothering him. He
told me that his mom had expressed her disapproval of him going
out with his friends to play pool and have a beer (which he did
on an average of once a month). He expressed some anger toward
his mom, but his conversation also reflected a great deal of
caring toward her. When he seemed to have fully expressed his
frustration I asked, "You love your mother, don't
you?". Mr E. nodded his head and began crying at that point.
I explained to him that most Mom's treat their adult children
like babies all their lives. I told him that was natural, and
that as adults we learned to accept it. I pointed out that Mom's
often don't like the things their adult children do. I told him
that as we mature, we begin making our own choices. At first, we
often hide them from our mothers, to avoid hassles. Eventually,
we are able to say, "Mom, I love you, but I'm going to take
this job, (have this friend, rent this apartment, etc.) because
it is the right thing for me to do." We talked for at least
thirty minutes, and I realized that up until that day, Mr E.
thought his mom's attitude toward him was a product of his
retardation, he had not realized that other mom's treated their
adult sons similary.
Mr F.
Mr F. was brought to my office by his station supervisor because
he was sitting at his work table, holding up his middle finger
which was upsetting the folks working around him. When I asked
him what was wrong, he expressed discontent with his life.
"I'm just not happy", he concluded.
"Ever?" I
asked.
"Not all the time",
he told me.
"No one is happy all the time."
He didn't look convinced, so I asked, "Do
you think I'm happy
all the time?"
"Oh yes", he
answered.
I reminded him of times that he had seen me both sad and angry. I
talked about the fact that everyone has problems, worries etc. I
talked about specific things that I was dissatisfiedwith in my
life, until I was sure that he understood that I had many of the
same emotions he did. We also discussed the idea that the
emotions a person feels are not wrong, but that their response to
their own emotions might be. I told him that it was OK that he
felt angry, or unhappy, but that it wasn't fair for him to act in
such a way that he could cause others to be hurt and/or angry.
Specifically, when he sat in his work station holding up his
middle finger, he caused several of his co-workers to become
upset. We finally agreed that when he felt the need to
"flip" something or someone off, he would go to the
restroom and make that gesture to the paper towell holder. The
serenity of the work station was not disrupted, and he was able
to relieve some of his pent up emotions. He did not always
implement this program on his own, but did respond to staff
reminders to take that behavior off the workfloor.
Miss G.
Miss G. came to Port City from an activity center that focused
more on activities than work skills. She was in her forties, her
speech was difficult to understand, and she cried easily. It did
not appear that she had ever earned money for work, and she did
not carry money to work. Her home sent money to the office so
that she could go on lunch outings occasionnally. At Port City we
believe that everyone can work, and so we set Miss G. up on one
of our easiest job tasks. The job was packaging small replacement
parts for the chains used on chain saws. Depending on the size,
they were packaged in lots of eight, nine or ten. Only a handful
of our workers could count accurately, so we used pieces of
plywood with the requisite number of squares drawn on them to get
the correct number of parts in their bags. If a worker put one
part in each square, then put them all into the plastic bag, they
would have done the job correctly. Staff showed Miss G. how to do
the job several times, then sat with her while she began to work.
She did not seem to understand the concept of putting one part in
each square. At first, she tried to cover the entire piece of
plywood with parts. After several hours of intensive one on one
training by several different staff people, she began just
putting the parts within the squares on the plywood. Each square
would be pretty full of the little chain saw parts, but they
wereall within the squares. Staff modeled the job for her over
and over again, then one of us would stand beside her giving
verbal cues. Miss G. was finally able to get it down to 4-5 parts
in each square. She just could not seem to understand the idea of
one part/square. This was our most basic job, and I was unwilling
to give up on Miss G. being able to earn some money of her own. I
was sure that she could get it. I looked around for something for
her to use to count parts that might seem finished to her with
just one part in it. I finally found some two by three inch
plastic boxes that we sometimes used for counting things that
would not lay still on the plywood jigs. Staff took turns sitting
by Miss G. We set out nine plastic boxes, and handed her the tub
of parts. As soon as she put the part in a box, we closed the lid
(the only way we could prevent her adding another part to the
box). When she had put a part in each box, we would take away her
tubof parts and add them to the bag too. As she finished each
bag, we took it away from the work area, so that she couldn't add
any parts to it later. In this way, she was able to package the
correct number of parts in each of her bags, and began to earn a
very small pay check. Over the next several months, Miss G. began
to grasp the concept, one to a box, and was ultimately able to do
the job using a flat plywood counting jig. She could produce a
lot more work that way, and was pleased when her pay checks began
to grow. Over the years she learned to do several of our other
jobs, and would call attention to each new job task she mastered.
People
with mental retardation learn at their own pace, and often in
their own way. I doubt that Johnny Paul Penry was ever given any kind of
structured teaching about the ways to treat other human beings,
or live in society. He was physically abused by his family, and
sexually abused by staff in the instructions he was sent to for
protection. He was shown by both family and unprofessional staff
members, that people hurt each other. He also learned from some
of his caregivers, that you take what you want. He does not seem
to have had any other teachers. We failed to keep him safe, we
failed to provide him with models that could teach him
appropriate behavior. He is currently under a death sentence: are
we going to kill him because we failed him?
Anne Rose-Pierce:
Chairperson
...after seventeen years...
3225 SE Alder Ct. #1
Portland, Oregon, 97214
arp@teleport.com