Mental defectiveness

“ Not only do defects "run in families," but they run in groups, and a physical defect such as club-foot, cleft palate, or any arrested development, is apt to be associated with some mental defect, and it is the mental more than the physical defects of individuals that prevent them being self-supporting helpful members of society. ”

“ It must be remembered that the defect in many children in these mentally defective schools shows itself as a lack of self-control, a want of mental balance, a missing sense of moral values, an incapacity for concentration—the very characteristics which render their unhappy possessors the easiest prey to the evil-minded. ”

“ Nothing can be gained by endeavoring to increase the intelligence of a mental defective. Nothing can be expected from an attempt to change the personality of the paranoid individual. A great deal can be accomplished, however, in controlling the emotional instability of those whose chief difficulty is the result of such instability, as well as the emotional difficulties of the paranoid and defective group. ”

“ It is not difficult to perceive the relation existing between a defective brain weight, paucity of the gyri, deficiency of properly developed cortical cells and such an elementary form of mental aberration as simple imbecility. The subject of the relation between structure and function gains in interest when we leave this domain of simple mental weakness to analyse the relation between structural defects and the positive symptoms of insanity and degeneracy—that is, moral perversion, mental obliquity, delusions, and morbid impulses. ”

“ Then add to defective vision his lack of physical endurance, his liability to various organic affections caused by structural defects, and his abnormal appetites which are constantly demanding for their gratification the things which are injurious to his mental and physical constitution, and we are enabled to judge, to some extent, of the obstacles against which, in the struggle for existence, the future man will find himself obliged to contend. ”

“ Such work is not only for the mentally disordered and those suffering from mental defect, but for all those who, through mental causes, are unable so to adjust themselves to their environment as to live happy and efficient lives. ”

“ When the mind undergoes degeneration, the moral feeling is the first to show it, as it is the last to be restored when the disorder passes away; the latest and highest gain of mental evolution, it is the first to witness by its impairment to mental dissolution.... ”

“ Since the ill-balanced are so numerous at ten years of age, and even at eight, we conclude that in many cases the mental instability is not the result of the perturbation which precedes puberty. This physiological explanation is not of such general application as is sometimes supposed.
[19] The Frequency of the Mixed Type, at once Defective and Ill-Balanced.—The third category of defective children which we have suggested includes those of a mixed type, who are at once mentally defective and ill-balanced. ”

“ This process of degeneration and simplification is characteristic of all forms of psychopathic conditions, though it may be more prominent in some cases than in others. The type of mental life becomes lowered and there is a reversion, a sort of atavism, to simpler and more childish experiences, memories, reactions of earlier and less complex forms of mental life. ”

“ Like the unstable or inert they are not failures because of a lack of intellectual understanding of right and wrong, but because of excess or deficiency of their instinctive tendencies especially in the emotional sphere. Such weakness of will may arise either from abnormality of specific instinctive impulses or inability to organize these impulses so that one impulse may 16be utilized to supplement or inhibit another. We may call all this group of cases socially deficient because of a weakness in the volitional, or conative, aspect of mind. ”

“ The effort to work becomes daily more laborious, the task of fixing the attention grows increasingly difficult, thoughts wander, memory fails, the reasoning power is enfeebled; prejudice—the shade of defunct emotion or some past persuasion—takes the place of judgment; physical nerve or brain disturbance may supervene, and the crash will then come suddenly, unexpected by on-lookers, perhaps unperceived by the sufferer himself. This is the history of "worry," or disorder produced by mental disquietude and distraction, occasionally by physical disease. ”

“ Such a definition will in addition restrict the term to such as are lacking in intelligence and will differentiate them from the moral defectives and the psychopathic personalities, which are at present often confused with the group that we propose to call feeble-minded. An individual may be at the same time a moral defective and feeble-minded, but there is reason to believe that moral deficiency may exist without such intellectual defect as to warrant a diagnosis of feeble-mindedness. ”

“ Yet my one great fault of intense self-consciousness haunts me still, mars my enjoyment, unnerves me often in the very moment of action, and makes me feel every day the evil brought upon a too sensitive disposition, when defects, whether physical or mental, are made a theme for ridicule and banter, without regard to the present pain and future loss such a course is only too sure to entail.—Temple Bar. ”

“ The type of behavior disorder, the social reactions, the trends of interests, etc., which psychopathic personalities may show give special features to many cases, e.g., criminal traits, moral deficiency, tramp life, sexual perversions and various temperamental peculiarities. ”

“ Feeble-mindedness may, however, arise from epilepsy or from other diseases or accidents in early life as well as from an inherent incapacity for development. 11Moreover, mental deficiency, or feeble-mindedness, (I use the terms interchangeably) does not imply that the social unfitness is always caused by intellectual deficiency. Mind is a broader term than intellect, as we shall note in the next section. ”

“ Persons of unsound mind—that is, persons who, owing to disorder of the mind, are incapable of managing themselves or their affairs.
"Class II: Persons mentally infirm—that is, persons who, through mental infirmity arising from age or decay of their faculties, are incapable of managing themselves or their affairs. ”

“ Short of cases of certifiable insanity there are a number of prisoners who are mentally defective. The total is small, but the individuals command an amount of attention, and cause an amount of trouble to the public, out of all proportion to their numbers. In some cases the defect consists of delayed development; the body and the passions have grown at a greater rate than the mental powers, but time and training would be likely to establish an equilibrium. ”

“ Even in the lighter forms of psychic degenerative forms that lie on the borderland of mental alienation, such, for instance, as are present in the various forms of psychopathic maladies we still find that the same relation holds good. ”

“ These inequalities of development may vary to any degree in different subjects. They always produce a want of equilibrium, and this want is the differentiating attribute of the defective child. But to draw a faithful picture we must add yet other traits. According to general opinion, mental deficiency is a disease, and although the idea of disease is very vague, we are inclined to fall in with this general opinion. ”

“ There is an interesting tendency on the part of people who are themselves defective in certain faculties of sensation, to conclude that when other people are wrapt in admiration of something that they cannot perceive, it is because these other people have some mental defect that leads them to enthuse too easily over their sensations. ”

“ If these two forces are lacking in the body to any considerable extent, we have sickness and infirmity and accidents of every kind. If they are lacking in the mind, we find every degree of mental deficiency, every variety of insanity. ”

“ But the essential nucleus of the defect is lack of balance, precocious parental fixation, and continued attachment to the parent-stem, that makes the adult defect possible. The very infantile precociousness of the emotions argues for the hereditary transmission of destructive temperamental qualities. Here, as elsewhere in tracing hereditariness in so-called functional nervosities, one should take as the unit character for study the mental traits or trends and exclude definite disease entities applied to ancestral disorders. ”

“ Physical defects beget sympathy—Rarely induce crime—May cause mental degeneration—Case of jealousy and murder.
Just as some degree of mental deficiency is not incompatible with the ability to live a peaceable and useful life, physical defects do not necessarily unfit a man to discharge his duties as a citizen. ”

“ But the gist of the whole matter is this: in a neurosis, certain forces of the personality—instincts and their accompanying emotions—which ought to work harmoniously, having become tangled up with some erroneous ideas, have lost their power of coöperation and are working at cross purposes, leaving the individual mis-adapted to his environment, the prey of all sorts of mental and physical disturbances. ”

“ It states regarding “moral imbeciles” that they are persons “who from an early age display some permanent mental defect coupled with strong vicious or criminal propensities on which punishment has had little or no deterrent effect.” It specifically distinguishes them from the group of feeble-minded which require guardianship because of inability to care for themselves. ”

“ MENTAL DEFECTIVES AND THE SOCIAL WELFARE. By MARTIN W. BARR, M. D.,
CHIEF PHYSICIAN, PENNSYLVANIA TRAINING SCHOOL FOR FEEBLE-MINDED CHILDREN, ELWYN, PA.
Periods of extraordinary efflorescence or fruitage are followed by exhaustion and sterility not infrequently demanding the free use of the pruning knife; and, just as we remark how frequent is idiocy the offspring of genius, so do we find the same seeming paradox, of mental defect in rank and increasing growth the product of this most wonderful nineteenth century. ”

“ If this is the case with those suffering only from mental deficiency, it is evidently more likely to occur in those suffering from any form of mental disease, which is often liable to change its character, and to pass from the form of depression to one of excitement. ”

“ In this complex diathesis which means greater susceptibility to temptations, there is little doubt that mental deficiency is the main factor. Aschaffenburg has well expressed one effect of this particular causal factor: “The weak-minded are generally children of the moment.... The lessons of experience, which serve normal persons as a guide, in later events, soon fade, be cause they cannot be fitted into the existing condition of the ideas. ”

“ In this case we fabricate causes a posteriori for them, satisfying our mental need of distinct causality, and we have no trouble in persuading ourselves that we have now truly explained them. The degenerate who shuns action, and is without will-power, has no suspicion that his incapacity for action is a consequence of his inherited deficiency of brain. ”

“ The depth of the congenital mental degeneration is from moral to social, then to sex, and last to food instincts. In the imbecile, only the moral, social, and intellectual activities are affected, the imbecility being according to the depth of the degeneration, the other instincts are more or less normal. In the idiot and cretin the process of degeneration has gone still deeper and sex and food instincts with their psycho-physiological functions and psychomotor adjustments become affected, the idiocy being in proportion to the gravity of the affection. ”

“ We are considered diseased, because in time the majority of us really become ill. I am almost convinced that two-thirds of us, in later life, when we really live so long, have a mental defect of one kind or another ”

“ We have seen the mental disorder affecting modern society manifesting itself chiefly in the following forms: Mysticism, which is the expression of the inaptitude for attention, for clear thought and control of the emotions, and has for its cause the weakness of the higher cerebral centres; Ego-mania, which is an effect of faulty transmission by the sensory nerves, of obtuseness in the centres of perception, of aberration of instincts from a craving for sufficiently strong impressions, and of the great predominance of organic sensations over representative consciousness ”

“ Mental defectives, it is argued, unlike the insane and pathological imbeciles, are not a special class of human beings, and they are chiefly distinguished from other normal persons by their low level of general intelligence. The term mental deficiency, as applied to convicts, as well as connoting a mind of inferior capacity, in many cases implies also an unbalanced mind, i.e., a mind whose equilibrium is easily disturbed by the preponderance of extreme degrees of objectionable and dangerous qualities, such as impulsiveness, excitability, passionate temper, &c. ”

“ Characteristics which pass as vices, eccentricities, defects of temper, peculiarities of disposition, come when critically examined to be explicable as minor grades of defective mental stability, although, on account of their great frequency, they have been looked upon as normal, or at any rate in the natural order of things. ”

“ It is quite superfluous to bring in tendencies atavistically recalled by pathological degeneracy, in order to explain the harmful effects of this degeneracy, and of mental diseases, upon the way in which the degenerate and mentally diseased act. ”