Mental retardation is a complex classification that has a number of different manifestations and a number of different causes. Throughout time, individuals with mental retardation were faced with the many challenges posed from living with a significant disability on a daily basis. Their challenges were magnified by the rather antiquated stigma and negative social perspectives on individuals who are mentally handicapped. Prejudice against individuals with mental retardation is apparent across different civilizations throughout history. According to author Wolf Wolfensberger, mentally retarded people have been viewed variously as "less than human," "a burden upon society," "a menace to society," "sick/medically ill," "objects of pity," and "eternal children/holy innocents" throughout the long course of Western history. Some of these perceptions have lead to direct persecution of mentally retarded individuals; others have lead to what might be charitably called "benign neglect." Even though some of these enforced social roles have resulted in better treatment for mentally retarded individuals than others, none of them has allowed for the possibility that mentally retarded individuals are, in their own ways, capable of learning, achieving, and becoming productive members of society.
A review of social attitudes toward the mentally retarded suggests that a given society's treatment of individuals with mental retardation tends to parallel their concepts of how the condition was caused. Societies that have recognized natural causes for mental retardation have tended to be less prejudiced, while societies that have emphasized supernatural causes have tended to be more prejudiced. A general failure, until modern times, to distinguish between mental retardation and mental illness has historically complicated the situation even further.
Many cultures, ancient and modern both, have considered mental retardation to be caused by demon possession or as a punishment by God (or gods) for sin or other misbehavior. There were exceptions where some physicians understood that mental illness was fundamentally a medical problem (e.g., secondary to brain damage: therapeutic papyri of Thebes (Luxor), Egypt, 1500 B.C.), but by and large, religious explanations dominated. Ancient Greeks and Romans looked upon the condition as a burden on society. Accordingly, mentally retarded individuals were treated atrociously by ancient Greek and Roman societies. The ancient Greeks and Romans commonly killed infants who were thought to be defective. Others were sold to be used for entertainment. Since mental retardation and mental illness were considered demonic possessions or punishments, the individual was looked upon as less than human.
Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization explores ideas, practices, art, and literature regarding madness in European civilization starting with the Middle Ages. Foucault's analysis starts with a discussion of how lepers were treated during the Middle Ages. Individuals who had leprosy were cast out of society and put into institutions. As leprosy waned, the institutions that housed them were left abandoned. Apparently, the stigma formerly attached to leprosy became attached to "mad" people and the mentally retarded, who became objects of pity or alternatively, considered dangerous to regular society. People who had mental retardation or mental illness started to be confined to asylums around the same time that leprosy lessened, while before they had been allowed to drift between towns and villages as homeless beggars and fools. About the same time as "mad" people started to be confined, the general explanation for the causes of "madness" also appear to have shifted from one of divine retribution or demonic possession toward more recognizably modern medical explanations.
