I learned about the principle of normalization through my contact with three leading Scandinavian figures. One was Erik Niels Bank Mikkelsen, the other one was Bengt Nierje and the third was Carl Grunewald. The President's Committee on Mental Retardation Commissioned one of its members, Dr. Robert Kugel, to write a document that could serve as a policy guide to the President's Committee.
on what to do about the institutional scene. Dr. Kugel was my dean at the medical school at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. And he recruited me to do most of of the legwork in getting that document together.
And we recruited a stellar panel of writers to contribute chapters to that book. And that included these three Scandinavians. who also at that time were touring the world, giving speeches, and beginning to talk about affording as normal conditions as possible to mentally retarded persons. We heard these people speak, and... And largely because of what they spoke on, you know, all three of these were recruited as contributors to that volume.
And Bengt, well, Bengt Mikkelsen had spoken about conditions as normal as possible, but it was Bengt Nehrje who, in response to the challenge of Producing a contribution of the book came up with the phrase the normalization principle and he was the first one who spelled it out. Again he did it first in a series of lectures that some of us heard and that impressed us very much and these lectures were supported by a wonderful illustrative slides that were very impressive. They were showing things that we had never seen before. And at any rate, they each wrote contributions.
Beniri wrote two contributions to the book. And that was essentially, not the birth of a child, but the birth of a child. of the kernel of the idea, but it certainly was the birth of a written corpus of writing on the topic. And we made that the cornerstone of our proposals for reform.
We made two assumptions. One was there was nothing that could be done about the institutional scene without paying attention to the residential services broadly. In other words, the whole continuum of potential residential settings had to be considered if you wanted to say anything meaningful about what institutions should be like and what their role should be and so on.
And the second assumption was that you couldn't even do that unless you took into account the entire service system. So residential and non-residential services had to be considered. There would be an overarching guiding principle or an idea and it suddenly hit us, principal normalization. It is high level, it applies to all services, it applies to all sorts of needy people and impaired people and societally devalued people.
And so we made that the centerpiece of the of the book and the book was a Big success, the presence committee distributed it by the zillion, free and largely, all over the country. And you can say that this is the book that broke the back of the institutional service system. It was the turning point in what happened to institutions after that.
At least in the field of mental retardation. So that, well that was the beginning. Now it's interesting that even in Scandinavia they had no written corpus of material either and so in Denmark and Sweden They took parts of the book and translated it back into Danish and Swedish because they had no Danish or Swedish literature on the principle of normalization.
They had a law in Denmark, but you know, the law is not a good teaching tool. So they re-translated it. One of them, From Dehumanization to Normalization, one of them says in Swedish. In Danish the same thing, Human Management and the Total Institution.
And this is the Swedish one. So that got the normalization idea going, but almost immediately I began to, you might say, try to systematize and sociologize and scientificate. the idea and I evolved it in a way that related it to the sociological literature, for example, role theory and to the earlier literature on dehumanization and so on. And I broadened it from emphasis on mentally retarded people to People who are devalued in society, and it could be not just for reasons of impairment, but for other reasons as well.
So I might say I universalized the idea and also showed how it can be applied to any human service, really, to any kind of recipient population. And I tried to... to publish articles on that in our leading mental retardation journal.
I submitted a series of articles and the editor lost them or sabotaged them. It's not quite clear, but for several years... they were not reviewed as they were supposed to be peer-reviewed. And when they finally were, the peer reviewers said that this was not a new idea, nothing new here is not worth publishing.
And that made me so mad, I decided that I would bypass the journal culture and just write a book about it. So I wrote The Principle of Normalization. In Human Services, which came out in 1973, early 1973, which really was a very delayed publication because the Changing Patterns book had come out in 1969. my articles, you know, were languishing there.
And so it took, it was a frustrating delay, you know, of three years to get the idea out in a systematic way. The book became a Canadian non-fiction bestseller. It was published in Canada because I'd moved there by that time. To the National Institute of Mental Retardation, which was, had been founded by the Parents'Organization in Canada. And I worked there for two years promoting community services and normalization and so on with very considerable success there.
So anyway... That's a little bit of the history. I also did manage to publish an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry. It's a flagship publication of the American Psychiatric Association. on the principle of normalization, how it would apply to psychiatric services.
They did publish it, but there was a lot of unhappiness in psychiatric circles, of course, and the mental health field has not embraced normalization to this very day. In fact, it's sort of been hostile toward it, including to its successors, social role valorization. But it made Newsweek.
They ran a news article on it. It had something like, Is basket weaving harmful? Or something like that. Because it said something in there about the psychiatric institution engaging their residents in activities that at one time were culturally normative, but they're no longer encountered in the culture. They were sort of...
anthropological museums, including putting people into OT to weave baskets and stuff like that.