Practice with Mentally Retarded Adults as an Adjunct to Vocational Training

MENTALLY RETARDED individuals,as well as most developmentally disabled persons, have been an unattractive population to most social workers. Where-as the desired client is young, attractive, verbal, intelligent, and success oriented, the mentally retarded person may Jack several of these qualities. Thus, if a men-tally retarded person is assigned to a social worker's caseload, the worker's response is likely to be negative. In all fairness, however, social work edu-cators and professionals have demonstrated some responsiveness to this population. Several schools of social work (for exam-ple, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Washington, Seattle) offer one or more courses on practice with the developmentally disabled. In addition, a growing number of social work practi-tioners have accepted developmentally dis-abled clients in their caseload. But these actions, although laudable, are minimal if the developmentally disabled are consid-ered a significant minority population. In this article, we review the impact of one recent change in the training of men-tally retarded adults—the shift to voca-tional training for placement in competi-tive jobs—and how this shift has resulted in an increase of psychosocial problems. One vocational training program is de-scribed to illustrate our concerns. In con-clusion, recommendations are made for alleviation of these problems. VOCATIONAL TRAINING Research over the past 20 years has dem-onstrated that moderately retarded adults and, to some extent, persons of more severe mental retardation can learn and perform skins required for competitive em-ployment. Early work by Huddle demon-strated that retarded individuals in a resi-dential institution could "learn and perform a regular industrial operation of a typ