"Retarded" / "Mental Retardation" (1950s–1960s)

 

• Origins: Introduced by the American Association on Mental Deficiency as a gentle, clinical replacement for "idiot" and "imbecile." From the Latin retardare (to slow down or delay), it was intended to convey that a child’s development was simply delayed, not broken.

• The Shift: By the 1980s and 1990s, "retarded" followed the exact same path down the pejorative treadmill. The term was formally eliminated from US federal law in 2010 with the passage of Rosa's Law, which replaced it across health and education codes with Intellectual Disability.

Part 2: Chapter Outline — The 100-Year Evolution of Disability Models

This structure outlines a full book chapter or lecture module tracing how society shifted from viewing disabled people as clinical deficits to recognising them as citizens navigating built and social environments.

       1920s: Medical / Clinical Deficit Model
                         ↓
       1950s: Institutionalization & Normalization
                         ↓
       1970s: The Rise of the Social Model (UPIAS)
                         ↓
       2000s+: Human Rights & Universal Design

Chapter Title: From Machine to Barrier: The 100-Year Journey of Disability Models

Section I: The Early 20th Century — Behaviourism, Measurement, and Deficits

• Scientific Imperialism: How early psychology (Watson, Goddard, Binet) sought to measure human efficiency.

• The Individual as the Problem: Framing human variation through a medical lens where anything outside the norm was viewed as a "deficit," "pathology," or "tragedy."

• The Conditioning Era: Behaviourist approaches aimed at forcing compliance and training disabled individuals to pass as "normal" rather than modifying environments.

Section II: Mid-Century Institutionalisation and the Euphemistic Era

• Out of Sight: Post-WWII institutional care and the isolation of people with intellectual and physical impairments.

• The Rise of Softened Language: How terms like "special," "handicapped," and "differently abled" emerged out of well-meaning attempts to soften clinical reality—and why they ultimately reinforced stigma by avoiding direct recognition.

Section III: The 1970s Paradigm Shift — The Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS)

• The Great Turning Point: The 1976 UPIAS manifesto in the UK that formally separated impairment from disability.

• The Social Model: Moving the target of intervention away from fixing the individual’s body/mind and onto dismantling society’s structural, political, and physical barriers.

• Parallel to Behaviourism: How the Social Model aligns with measurable, public environments rather than unobservable inner states.

Section IV: The Civil Rights Era to Universal Design

• "Nothing About Us Without Us": The legislative revolution (from the UK Disability Discrimination Act 1995 to the Americans with Disabilities Act 1990).

• The Curb-Cut Effect: How designing for disabled people systematically improves the environment for all of society.

• Modern Identity Model: Viewing disability not as a medical tragedy or a dirty word, but as a valid form of human diversity.