MISSOURI WATCH: IMPROVING CARE FOR THOSE WHO KNOW HOW TO LOVE IS SLOW GOING

Several years ago I visited one of the few skills-training classes offered to residents of a Missouri habilitation center for the mentally retarded and developmentally disabled. Anxious to learn how successful the program was, I turned to a young girl, perhaps no older than 10 or 12, and asked, "What have you learned in this class?" The young girl's face brightened as she replied, "Oh, lots of things. But I already know how to love."

Anyone conversant with the mentally retarded soon learns these special children have a great capacity for love, the greatest gift our Maker can bestow on any of us, and so it isn't unusual to witness more happy faces and more radiant smiles around God's special people than are ever encountered in our outside world. Indeed, one of the signs of normalcy these days is a scowling face and a downtrodden expression.

Over the four decades I have been interested in the care and treatment offered Missouri's mentally ill and retarded, I have grown to suspect, without any medical confirmation, that the joy and happiness so obviously present among the mentally retarded are God's way of compensating for their condition.

Indeed, there are special skills displayed by these special people that can be found nowhere else in the human race. A visitor to a state habilitation center may be anonymous on the first trip, but let him return even months later and he will be welcomed by several residents, and by the third trip, he will be greeted by smiles from virtually everyone he has ever seen in the center. You can't even get that kind of response from your local Wal-Mart.

In recent months I have become increasingly concerned over the difficulty the state's Department of Mental Health is experiencing in trying to maintain even minimal care of far too many of the more than 25,000 mentally retarded under its care. To understand the problem, readers need to know some of the history that has produced a no-win situation for thousands of parents across our state.

Forty years ago, there were virtually no mentally retarded citizens above the age of 25. To find a 40-year-old in a habilitation unit was unusual, and only a few existed anywhere. The reason: most born with retardation didn't live beyond the age of 12 or 15, many of them dying of pneumonia and other lung ailments as a result of their hospitalization and, yes, sometimes inadequate medical attention. Improvements in drugs and increased public and then political support for better treatment facilities added greatly to patient life spans. Improved treatment programs also aided in preserving lives, and during the 1970s and 1980s, we experienced something even more revolutionary: patients with modified retardation were placed in community settings and went to work every day, living apart from the institutional settings that can deter near-normalcy for some while remaining necessary for still others. As in so many cases, the federal government adopted its pejorative all-or-nothing methods, dictating that certain patients be released from habilitation centers and placed in social settings which some found difficult to cope with. Some of that balance has been restored, but unfortunately, not enough of it as yet.

And then along came the 1980s when recessionary budgets closed traditional clinical units, throwing even more of the mentally retarded into community oblivion, along with many more thousands of the mentally ill. Society paid for this indifference in countless ways, but more importantly, the ill and retarded paid an ever higher price with the loss of adequate medical care, lowered standards of living and, yes, even public indifference and, even worse, official neglect.

Let me tell you something I observed during that recent, turbulent period: I never heard a mentally retarded man or woman, boy or girl, complain about how they were being treated. Never once. Loss of treatment or supervision was accepted without complaint and the smiles and the greetings for facility visitors never diminished.

It was a trying time for patient and parent alike, although both suffered immeasurably and sometimes without end even up to and including this moment.

As one who closely monitors how Missouri politicians care for and treat the mentally ill and mentally retarded, I wish I could assure you that improvements were continually being made. But I can't. There has been progress, particularly as affluence has increased and state budgets have moved higher and higher without interruption. But requests for better treatment facilities, newer drugs and more clinical staffing are still regularly ignored or decreased to "acceptable' standards. The awful truth is that more prison inmates are housed in newer quarters than thousands of mentally ill and retarded inpatients. You and I both know the reason for this horrible condition: the public demanded that criminals be locked up and failed to demand that the mentally ill and retarded be given better treatment.

I am not delusional enough to believe this will change. The public's priorities are immediate, transient and sybarite, and these priorities, realistically speaking, are not likely to change in the next millennium.

It may seem strange to declare that our modern society has much to learn from the mentally retarded, their families and their relatives. We could learn acceptance, maturity, patience and resolve, all qualities that society as a whole seems to evidence in diminishing amounts with each passing year.

But, most of all, we could emulate the joy expressed by the young mentally retarded girl first mentioned. We could know and experience how to love -- even as we encounter less and less of it in today's far-from-normal society.

Jack Stapleton of Kennett is the editor of Missouri News and Editorial Service.