Bengt Nirje on Normalization

Bengt Nirje: The point of the situation was this. And that was that, at this time in Sweden, even though later the Kennedy Commission came over to see us too and found that Sweden and Denmark were far ahead of the rest of the world, the fact is that we were dissatisfied because, as a matter of fact, what we had was we had no services in the community with few exceptions. And those exceptions were some schools for the mildly, some moderately and the mildly mentally handicapped, in the larger cities. All the rest were institutions for children and for adults. Central institutions was more the workhouse and the boarding schools which [Inaudible] where we mixed children and adults [Inaudible] in the same. But there were boarding schools up in the countryside that were not very nice. And there were special hospitals for mentally disabled and so on, but nothing that helped.