ABSTRACT
With the first line written on the subject of learning disabilities comes the first problem. For unlike other physiological or biochemical disorders, such as damaged limbs, for which there is general agreement on definitions used for classification, the classification of mental disorder, and specifically that involving people with learning disabilities, has been subject to wide-ranging disagreements among those connected with it. These disagreements, in fact, go beyond classification, and on to causation, prognosis, and the most appropriate method of response by human services. Even the use of the term ‘learning disabilities’ immediately places the authors in a certain sector of opinion; the use of alternatives such as mental subnormality, mental retardation, special needs, developmental disability, mental handicap, or even learning difficulty, would have located them elsewhere. So too, the writing of a book on services, rather than about people with learning disabilities, is seen by some as a political statement, an acceptance of the status quo. However, as Ryan and Thomas (1987) put it: ‘The changing definitions of difference constitute the history of mentally handicapped people’ and so in an attempt to understand that history it is necessary to trace the definitions and classifications made by both individuals and governments in trying to describe the sort of person that this book defines as having learning disabilities.
