On Helping the Mentally Handicapped

The very least that I would expect had I been born with such disadvantages would be to have my living expenses covered from cradle to grave.

7th May 2022

Deep in my heart, I know that I don’t really care about helping people with mental disabilities. At least not in the same way that other people seem to.

I am not wholly unsympathetic to their plight, however. When, as a young boy, I arrived at school wearing a homemade cape, I was swiftly recommended for an autism screening by my teacher. Against her wishes, Mother never took me to any sort of screening, knowing as she did that there could never be anything wrong with me. But I often wonder what course my life might have taken had I done so. Had I been certified autistic at that young age, would my eccentric behaviour have compounded, finding its justification in that medical label?

The memory of this returned to me some years ago, during my brief time as a student, when I was obliged to attend a session on raising awareness of mental disability. It was hosted by a nearby centre in Bedfordshire which dedicated itself to this mission, and attendence was implied to be all but essential for us to achieve a passing grade.

I had entered the event into my calendar long before and without paying any attention to its content, noting it down as another obligatory meeting and assuming, with a great deal of probability, that it would be another session on cultural diversity. Arriving late, I was dissapointed to find that it was a more intimate arrangement than I had come to expect in the university lecture halls. I was led into a small meeting room, with coffee and biscuits, and a great deal of fuss was made about my arriving late. Realising that the session was on the mentally handicapped, I considered excusing myself by telling them that I had accidentally gotten lost by the bins out back, that I had difficulty orientating myself in medium to large spaces, in the hope that they would interpret my absent-mindedness as a diagnosable mental condition and go easy on me.

My apology was instead rather muted, and they soon launched into telling us that approximately 95% of the mentally handicapped in the United Kingdom were unemployed, and that this was a tragedy not only for the mentally handicapped, but for the rest of us. The mission of the organisation, then, was to thrust as many of these poor souls into low-paying employment in order to give them a sense of purpose and — more importantly — to ease the tax-burden on the rest of us normal, industrious people.

— Why, said one of the organisers, should we import another 500,000 Romanians to pick our fruit and vegetables when we have a wealth of untapped labour in our disabled community?

On this point I differ from those who care about the mentally handicapped. I do not care that they do not work, nor that they claim a significant portion of the treasury’s benefit fund. The very least that I would expect had I been born with such disadvantages would be to have my living expenses covered from cradle to grave.

Before we got the idea into our heads that the mentally handicapped were uniquely capable of finding meaning in life from menial work, we were content to let them wander around the village, amusing us with their eccentric conversation and getting into the odd comical scrape with a stray goat. The idea that a man unable to grasp a hoe from the right end should be responsible for feeding himself would have horrified us, assuming as we did that any passer-by with an ounce of Christian compassion would have spooned a few cups of cold porridge into his hungry mouth.

I am only grateful that I managed to avoid receiving any sort of diagnosis myself. Had that occured, I would not have been treated as a feckless layabout living off the state as I am now, but as someone desperate to realise his potential as a shopping cart collector, kitchen porter or berry-picker.