Dear Psychiatrist
By Jennie Roberts

Foreword by Baroness Mary Warnock

The story of Tom is fascinating and illuminating in equal proportions.

One of the main purposes of the Report on Children with Special Needs (UK, 1978), and of the subsequent 1981 Education Act, was to take proper account of the vast differences between different children with learning difficulties; and Tom emerges from these pages as his own person, an individual of wit and courage, with patchy talents, sensitive feelings, and enormous difficulties to overcome in adapting to the world.

The story is of how his adaptation has been affected by others; by his parents, and the professionals with whom he and they were involved. The lessons are clear enough. First and most important, it is essential that teachers should, in their training, come to realize the variety of obstacles that may stand in the way of education for children whose needs are special, the greatest obstacle of all being a feeling of failure and hope-lessness. All teachers need to learn that this feeling of failure may come from the bullying and ridicule of contemporaries, or from a crass failure of imagination on the part of some teachers themselves. Without such training, and a willingness to put it into practice, the policy of integrating handicapped children into ordinary classes may be a disaster.

The second lesson is that, if things are to go well, there must be cooperation among the professionals themselves. This means that teachers, doctors and social workers must trust each other, believe each other, and write proper reports to each other. It is a tall order; but it is essential if the child himself is not to suffer.

Third there is a lesson to be learned about parents. In the Report we boldly entitled one chapter 'Parents as Partners'. We knew this to be provocative, but we meant it. The parents of a handicapped child are in a position to know him in a way that no one else can. They know what he can do, what flusters him, what he will regard as unjust or humiliating. Too often these parents are treated by the professionals as the source of certain factual information about childhood illnesses and position among siblings, but otherwise as fools; or, worse, as pig-headed, over-protective or over-ambitious villains. All professionals are equally guilty; among all of them such attitudes are sometimes to be found, though doubtless for rather different reasons. And so the history of the relationships between Tom's parents and the professionals should be compulsory reading for anyone entering training, whether as a psychiatrist, an educational psychologist, a teacher or a social worker. Too often it makes the blood run cold.

For my part, I am truly grateful to Tom's mother for telling the story so straight, and with such moving intelligence. It is as if it were a human commentary on the 1981 Act, and the Report that went before it.

Mary Warnock