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The British Journal of Developmental Disabilities
POINTS OF VIEWBY THE BY:Sumpin Else Someone once calculated that the core vocabulary - "heavy duty" words - of adults with a severe learning disability amounted to approximately two hundred words. Alex Tobias Jr., aged 25, research assistant from the American mid-west, had perhaps a dozen more. On his way to the United Kingdom for a year's academic work, he made time to do Europe at speed. Paris, in his opinion, was sumpin else. Geneva was sumpin else. So was Prague. High in the Alps he put on skis for the first time and learned to do a decent christie. The sensation, and here he groped for the exact words, was sumpin else. But he could be critical too. A bull fight in Spain he found kinda scary, lotta blood. He didn't like Edinburgh - the castle was kinda small and there was a helluva lot of rain that afternoon. After he'd had a few, it became clear that his memory pegs of the tour were the women he had picked up. He had particularly fond memories of Francoise whom he met in a back street art gallery in Marseille. Not the least of her attributes was that she spoke real good English, almost as good as his own. Alex was a self-professed expert in "mennal retardation" and his "research focus" was on stress in the families of a child with a learning disability. As part of his practical work in Northern Ireland he had to visit such families (and controls) and get the parents to complete a battery of questionnaires and sundry similar tasks. For the first fortnight of these house calls, all made by appointment, he was accompanied by dour, penniless Robert McHugh, himself a research assistant, who knew parts of the province reasonably well and who could advise the newcomer about problems to do with the civil unrest. Day One, Home Visit One. They stopped at traffic lights. Alex took chewing gum from his mouth, rolled it into a ball and flicked it out the window. "My father bought me this sports car", he explained, "he's in real estate, and I mean he's big, big in real estate. You like it huh?" Robert nodded. "Might go to Dublin this weekend", Alex went on, "see the sights. Have a few beers . . . Do I need my passport? . . . Hey Robert, what's this with the blarney stone huh? What do you do with it? Sit on it? . . ." They drove on to a leafy suburb. The American pressed the doorbell, straightened his tie, drummed his fingers on the clipboard and glanced once more at the BMW in the driveway. An elderly man leaning heavily on a stick opened the door and invited the two research assistants in. "Hey", said Alex looking enthusiastically around him, "you got a real nice place here, it's sumpin else huh?". While mother poured coffee into delicate china and offered cake, father limped over to the grand piano to collect framed photographs. There were five children in the family, four boys, one girl. Tom, the one with the learning disability was the youngest, nineteen years old, and today he was at the Day Centre as usual. The older sibs, it was clear from the photographs, were all graduates. There was pride in the old man's voice and in his wife's smile as the photographs were passed around. That's James, he's a consultant physician in Cambridge, Rhona is a teacher in a grammar school . . . Alex Tobias Jr. cut in. "What about Tom, huh? You gotta photo of him?". The old man went silent. Mother carefully folded her doyley. "Yes, of course we do", she said, "but not in this room at the moment. There's one of him as a boy in the kitchen". Father pressed his finger tips together and stared at the ornate fireguard. "Tom is still with us", he said softly. "He always will be. He's a good lad, helps us by drying the dishes . . ." His voice petered out. Alex lifted the clipboard. "Like I said in the letter, I'd appreciate your answers to some research questions. Like for example . . . Do you think Tom will some day get a real job huh? You know, paid real money . . . ?" Nearly two hours later, as the young men walked away from the house, Robert looked back. The old man waved goodbye. But his shoulders had slumped. "Gotta cut down on the rapporting time", Alex Tobias Jr. announced, "we're way behind skejule". Day Three. Evening. Alex Tobias Jr. paced his flat, eating pizza and drinking fizz. Six home visits completed. Check. All questionnaire items completed. Check. All supplementaries completed. Check. All the papers in the right order for processing. Check. Routes for tomorrow's home visits worked out. Check. He smiled, settled into an armchair and switched on the television. In the gloom of his lonely digs Robert McHugh ground his molars to the roots and had Nurofen for tea. He was stressed out and fully appreciated the irony of it. Causes? He thought he could identify at least two. First, the whole field of learning disability was new to him. Frightening too. His limited job was to help the American find his feet. Sitting in on the interviews he couldn't at times help being upset. How did some of these families cope? How in the case of the handicapped child did they adjust their hopes downwards? And by how much? Second, and infinitely more to the point was Alex Tobias Junior's rapid and apparently effortless conversion of other people's raw emotions into remote and lifeless statistics. To be sure he tut tutted appropriately and sympathetically but, really, his aim was to put ticks into boxes. The American had explained that there were many professionals out there - social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists amongst others - whose job it was to deal with emotional problems. He was into basic research. And that was different. You can't, he insisted, deal effectively with stress until you understand what it is and how it comes about. Day Four. Home Visit Seven. Alex steered his car into a run-down estate. The sun glinted off broken glass littering the streets. Children were dancing around a burnt-out car. Dogs nosed rubbish piles and each other. One delicate touch: a young man in bovver boots and with a ring in his ear was carefully adding the finishing touches to a mural on a gable end. Alex pulled up at one of the small terrace houses. Robert offered to stay in the car in case anyone took a fancy to it but Alex said it was okay. The two men walked up the garden path squeezing past a sunken cement mixer and knocked at the door. A woman with tattoos on her arms appeared. "Hi! Mrs. Brown? Hi, I'm Alex Tobias. How are you, huh?" "Not much better for your asking". ‘Say, that's great! Meet Robert here. May we come in?". The living room was nondescript in the narrow sense that there was very little to describe: faded carpet and curtains; a single, bare bulb in the ceiling: a horse-hair sofa; a formica-topped table with bacon rinds on it; three wooden chairs; a mangle; a broken oar. "Nice place you got here Mrs. Brown, real nice". "Everyone says that", she replied. Robert was warming quickly to this woman. Alex plunged on oblivious. There were eight children. One of the older boys had been shot dead. Another was doing life. Two boys were in a young offenders' place. Sammy, the one with the learning disability, was at an SLD school. One girl was married and had left home. The other two girls should have been at school but were still in bed. Dad had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital with DTs. "You gotta lot of stress here", Alex volunteered. "Only the smart ones notice", she said, "are you here to help?" Robert smiled his first smile of the week. Well, Alex said, stress was a kinda complicated thing. The concepts of dysfunction, pathology and crisis were stone age stuff. Stress could be operationally defined as consisting of demands (potential stressors), stress (the effects of external forces on the person) and strain (the after effects of stress). Robert squirmed in embarrassment. The trick, Alex told them both, was to diminish the strength of potential stressors. "How in the name of God can I do that?" Mrs. Brown demanded, and buried her head in her hands. Robert glanced out of the window. Alex's car had disappeared. "What the hell?" roared Alex and ran to the door just in time to see it going round a corner. He was dancing with rage. "Where's the phone? The goddam phone!" "What phone?" Mrs. Brown asked. Alex lifted the oar, ran to the cement mixer, hit it twice, ran back. "Get the police, get the cops". He picked up a bacon rind, tried to knot it. "The polis?" Mrs. Brown asked and burst out laughing. Alex ran into the street. There was no-one about. He ran back. Mrs. Brown put her hand on Alex's shoulder, pushed him down into a chair, and put her face close to his. "You're stressed out, son. The way to look at your problem is to think of it in three parts. There's the demand or potential stressors. Then there's stress. Then there's the bullshit". Robert went outside and lit a cigarette. This day, he said aloud, has been sumpin else.
D. N. MacKay Muckamore Abbey Hospital, Antrim, Northern Ireland BT41 4SH
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