A social skills group with mentally retarded subjects

The importance of social effectiveness in securing personal needs, and of social competence training in rehabilitation programmes for psychiatric and mentally retarded patients, have been frequently stated. The need to improve further the social effectiveness, especially communication skills, of the mentally retarded prior to discharge from hospital has been particularly stressed. However, the focus of communication training has been on linguistic and arithmetic skills, while little attention has been paid to non-verbal skills, this despite the fact that their importance in communication has been widely demonstrated. It is suggested here that improvement in basic interaction skills, including non-verbal components, will improve communication and increase the social effectiveness of the mentally retarded in the community outside the hospital. An attempt was made to improve mentally subjects' basic interaction skills by means of a social skills training group. There was significant improvement in target behaviours after training and some improvement was maintained at 8 weeks follow-up. The study suggests that such training groups might effectively the communication skills of mentally retarded subjects.