As the cultural climate changed, movements for reform of how people with mental retardation were treated occurred. During the late 1800s, Dorothea Dix pressed the United States federal and state governments to provide care and housing for individuals with mental illnesses and mental retardation. Her efforts were great, and she achieved success in convincing many states to build hospitals for affected individuals.
Although many hospitals were built and staffed, the patients were still not treated well. Many were severely neglected and mistreated in these institutions.
Locke's vision of the mind as a "blank slate" and the unlimited human freedom that this view implied inspired Edouard Seguin, a pioneer in the development of strategies for educating children with mental retardation, during the 1800s. Seguin's approach involved teaching via the five senses and was built on the belief that intellectual functioning and the senses were related. His strategies involved using self-help skills and vocational education in practical ways.
The first step in Seguin's system involved sensory training that exercised the individual's hearing, vision, taste, smell, and hand-eye coordination. Daily living and work skills were taught using positive reinforcement. The curriculum focused on imitation, memory, and generalization skills. Perception and coordination activities were also used to help students evolve their skills and knowledge. Seguin founded the American Association on Mental Retardation. His techniques were quite successful and many of his educational strategies and interventions are still used today (albeit in modified form) for the treatment of individuals with mental retardation.
At the same time that mental retardation was first being treated in an organized and recognizably modern way, it was also first being formally understood as a mental disorder with a medical cause. The American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders goes back to the 1840s, and filled a need for a uniform system of naming, classifying, and recording cases of mental illness. When the DSM-I was first published in 1952, mental retardation was one of the sixty disorders included in that document.
