The Cloak of Competence, Revised and Updated edition

This new edition brings up to date a classic study of the everyday lives of previously institutionalized people with mental retardation. For the first time, the author allowed these people to speak about their own lives, their fears, and their hopes. He focused on the role of stigma in their lives and their efforts to pass as normal, as well as the need they had for normal benefactors.

Now, using the same ethnographic methods, Robert Edgerton follows up the original population over a period ...