The British Journal of Psychiatry: Volume 161 - Issue 4

The Mentally Handicapped and Their Families: J. Tizard and J. C. Grad
Janet Carr
Published online by Cambridge University Press:

02 January 2018, pp. 579-581
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In the first half of this century - the period covering the life time of the subjects of this book - parents of children with learning disabilities were in the main ignored by professionals. In the mid 1940s–50s there was “a trickle of armchair papers” discussing parent dynamics (Wolfensberger, 1967) but little attention was paid to the parents' lives, their burdens, their needs, in short, what it was like to have a child with severe learning disabilities in the family. When Jack Tizard and Jackie Grad, psychologist and social worker respectively, began their project in 1954, no other study of the kind existed. Three publications appeared before theirs (Saenger, 1957; Holt, 1958; Farber, 1959) but theirs is the first that is both meticulously scientific in its approach and humane in its outlook.

The British Journal of Psychiatry