Is mental retardation of a perfectly normal looking person possible?

Most of the mentally retarded people I have seen in public usually had other physical abnormalities that pegged them as mentally retarded (Downs syndrome etc.) I can’t really recalll ever having seen someone who was perfectly normal looking and still had a Downs syndrome level IQ.

Is it possible to have someone who is perfectly normal looking (handsome or beautiful even) and physically OK in every way except that their mental capacity is lacking to the point they would be considered retarded?( ie well below Forrest Gump level).

Does Turette’s Syndrome count? My brother had a student, nice guy, who had Turette’s.

My instinct tells me that yes, folks with lower I.Q.'s can be beautiful. They are on the news all the time.

Turette’s isn’t associated with MR/DD.

Simply - yes. But our perception of “normal looking” is strongly defined by posture, expression, body language, grooming, etc, so that a person with severe mental retardation may well look ‘wrong’ even if there’s no outright physical abnormality.

Sure. Rosemary Kennedy, for instance, looked perfectly normal (and quite pretty, at least in her younger days).

Yes. As an example, kids with autism physically look like any other kid. As stated earlier, such things as posture, movement, action, facial expresssion, etc. may be signs of a disability.

And real briefly, “mental retardation” is not determined solely by IQ score. IQ tests are sometimes not designed to accuratel/adequately measure IQ below a certain level.

It’s not the IQ that matters, it’s “What can the person do?” The federal regulation which defines “mental retardation” for school kids talks about, “significant in impairment in one or more areas of life activities such as feeding, dressing, communication, social communication, independence, etc.”* IQ is not a determining factor for the disability.

Whistlepig

  • paraphrased by a tired memory. The full regulation can be found at ideapractices.org , IDEA regulations, definitions, mental retardation.

What a bizarre thing to say! Have you IQ tested every person you have seen to find if their IQ qualifies them for a ‘mentally retarded’ (IQ less than 70) label?
People with Downs syndrome and other disabilities that have physical manifestations as well as intellectual ones are easy to identify, however, there are vast numbers of people out there with MR level IQs and no physically distinguishing features. IQ and physical appearance are not related. Even people with Downs and similar disorders have varying IQs.

Bad example,whistlepig , kids with autistic spectrum disorders can not only look perfectly normal but can have IQs in the very superior range, I have an ASD son who belongs to Mensa.

In Australia, at least, and on every American site I have read, a MR (Intellectually Impaired here these days) label requires either an IQ less than 70 OR functioning at a level that would be considered in the bottom 3% of thier peers (pretty much for people who cannot do an IQ test)
Australian link
american link

From your “American link”:

Emphasis mine. Just to clarify, this is an AND criteria, not an OR. You have to meet all of these criteria to meet the definition. This is important because some people test poorly (or the test isn’t a good fit for them) AND there must be functional adaptive problems. This helps rule out false diagnosis.

Well… let me be more specific then. To the best of my knowledge, and based strictly on my own potentially limited powers of empirical observation I have never seen or heard in public a normal looking person physically, who subsequently through behavior or language was indicated to have a Down’s Syndrome range of mental acuity.

In retrospect though, I think raygirvan’s point has significant merit and some of what I am have perceived as congenitally contorted features on non-Down’s syndrome mentally retarded people might simply be the result of lack of directed muscle control over their facial features.

  1. Tourette’s Syndrome is basically a brain malfunction, correctable with medication. It is not linked to mental retardation.

  2. Rosemary Kennedy, from what I understand, suffered from brain damage that occurred well after she was born. This could have happened to ANY of us.

  3. You’re probably thinking of two syndromes which are linked to mental retardation – Down’s Syndrome, and Cretinism. Both of these tend to impose a distinctive “look” upon the person, and therefore lead to the idea that mental retardation is linked to “looking a little odd.” This is reinforced by two OTHER medical situations linked to MR, namely microcephaly and hydrocephaly. Microcephaly causes a “pinhead” appearance, whereas hydrocephalics tend to have enlarged, oddly shaped heads. You don’t see these two as often these days, since medical science has gotten better; Cretinism is disappearing, too, for the same reason.

…but brain damage – prenatal or postnatal – can happen to anyone. Worked in various mental hospitals for years, and I’ve known any number of cases of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome that you wouldn’t think were unusual at all if you sat next to 'm on the bus on the way home… unless you struck up a conversation. And even then, it might take you a minute to realize there was something odd about the fellow…

Thanks for your very informative post. In looking at the scenarios you describe I suppose I need to narrow the question down a bit. Is there any congenitial genetic defect that (assuming a normal birth and no fetal injuries) could or would produce a perfectly normal looking person (physically) with a Down’s Syndrome range of mental function.

I purposefully said “autism” because I meant “autism” as classicly defined.

Not PDD, not Aspergers, not PDD-NOS, etc. I was not referring to the whole spectrum of autism. I didn’t want to confuse the issue by talking about kids who specifically do not have sub-average intellectual functioning as part of the diagnostic criteria.

whistle pig, what do you mean by autism as classically defined?

Fragile X syndrome.

[ahem] George W. Bush [Diogenes ducks and runs]

Yes, Astro. It is not only possible but happens quite often. Also the preferred nomenclature is Developed Mentally Delayed. Having worked with people of this particular affliction for many years, I have a certain sensitivity about the subject. There is a plethora of different abnormalities that can result from thousands of different means, ranging from genes to F.A.S. and yes some have no physical attributes.

I certainly know what you mean Astro. Don’t let anyone give you a knee-jerk “open-minded” trip either. Wang-Ka added microencephaly to the list which is probably the cause of the second most widely held image of the odd-looking mentally retarded person (next to Downs). There are also the cases where brain damages causes not only an intellectual deficiency but some amount of palsy as well which would account for a spastic appearance. Autism is only incidentally related to mental retardation but would more accurately be described as social retardation.

Astro

Your proposed range of IQ is a lot broader than you think. People with Downs Syndrome have obtained college degrees. Some are unable to speak or walk, and most function at some level between the two. In the next thirty years you will begin to meet people who have Downs Syndrome and are not retarded, or even particularly handicapped, since many are now receiving therapies which prevent the damage so common in the syndrome.

But, you have undoubtedly met many people who are legally retarded and you never noticed. They might not have said much, or spoken to you at all. Retarded people who function well enough to engage the general public often are generally fairly shy, and often go out of their way to avoid being identified by their handicaps. But I assure you I know many people who are retarded, and are quite normal, even attractive in appearance. Some even speak in with the confidence and articulation that are common in ordinary people. A few are great conversationalists, and some are able to bring their perspective to your conversation. (Admittedly, in most cases only one or two of these aspects will be true for one retarded person.)

I know a very beautiful woman who is mildly retarded. She is astoundingly facile in brushing off the attention of men who hit on her. She learned it over many years. But she is retarded, and does need support to function in our complicated society. And she understands how much her limits matter to other people. It took a very long time for her to unlearn the lesson that she could never let a man become close to her. And then, it hurt a lot to find out that she is not good at picking out the men who really don’t care about her intellect, and do care about her self.

A man I know, also retarded, works in an office in the Federal Government, and only his direct supervisor and a very few people in his office know he is mentally retarded. He was trained very carefully, and he knows and does his job with very little supervision. (He collects and shreds classified documents, for which he is very highly qualified, since he cannot read, and had to learn to identify the classification stamps by visual cues.) Most of the people he works with think he is just a real quite guy. He says hello, and how are you, and other conversational trivia, and if a coworker asks about his personal life, he gives them minor trivia, just like you and I. He learned his from a job coach who knew that those skills were important in maintaining a public position. He really can’t hold a lengthy conversation, and if you do try to elicit one from him at work, he will say, “I wish I could talk, but I have to get back to work. Bye.”

Actually, something the opposite of what you are talking about happens to me a lot. I see people in normal places, doing normal things, and I recognize that they suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome, or some other syndrome that is often associated with mental retardation. Some of them are probably mentally affected by it, too. But they are not retarded, legally. I can sometimes tell if someone has been on Dilantin, Haldol, or Thorazine for a long time, just by looking at them. Other things are readily evident to me, because I have seen them so very many times. It doesn’t mean that they are retarded, only that they have these syndromes which are often associated with retardation.

But the range of IQ we call normal is very broad indeed. Most of the very bright and successful people you know are normal in intelligence, and those idiots you yell at in traffic are normal too. By definition, most of us are normal, and by consequence, most of the very low functioning people are never anywhere where you will meet them. The very smartest have their own set of segregational forces.

That’s the thing about normal. It’s so damn common.

Tris

Yup, that TD gait jumps out at me. Ditto FAS and FAE. Might be worth mentioning that folks with chronic mental illnesses sometimes have a fairly restricted world and fairly limited interpersonal skills, so some of them might seem MR/DD when you first see or interact with them.