Chronicity in Mental Retardation

Abstract

Mental retardation is one of the major handicapping conditions in our population. Mental retardation, as the term is commonly used today, affects a heterogeneous population ranging from totally dependent to nearly “normal” people. The definition of mental retardation according to the Classification in Mental Retardation (Grossman, 1983) published by the American Association on Mental Deficiency, is as follows:

• Mental retardation refers to significantly subaverage general intellectual functioning in or associated with concurrent impairments in adaptive behavior and manifested during the developmental period.

• General intellectual functioning is operationally defined as results obtained by assessment with one or more of the individually administered, standardized general intelligence tests developed for that purpose.

• Significantly subaverage is defined as an IQ of 70 or below on standardized measures of intelligence. This upper limit is intended only as a guideline and could extend upward through an IQ of 75, especially in school settings, if behavior is impaired and clinically determined to be caused by deficits in reasoning and judgment.