Socialization of Dyssocial Children

This paper is concerned primarily with the dilemma that faces most city hospitals coping with the influx of new populations whose basic needs are foreign to many professionals. The notions herein described have been largely derived from experiences with the children who attended the Cumberland Hospital Mental Hygiene Clinic of the Brooklyn-Cumberland Medical Center. The clinic is situated in what was formerly a middle-class Catholic Irish-Italian community that is now poor black and Puerto Rican.

The evolution of the Cumberland community is but a part of a national trend. In 1940 Chicago had a total black pupil school enrollment of 10%; today the nonwhite enrollment, which is predominantly black, is 50% (in Washington, D.C., it is over 87%). In 101 years the number of black pupils in Los Angeles has doubled and represents 20% of the entire school population. Similarly the neighborhoods, churches, and hospitals of New York City have changed. The patients who attend the outpatient departments of New York City public hospitals are lower-income and welfare-supported indigents who are 50 to 75% black and Puerto Rican.

Most of the children seen in our clinic were referred by the public schools with severe conduct disorders (hyperactive, restless, poorly controlled, talkative in classrooms, and assaultive).2 3 They had histories of poor attention spans and underachievement. On clinical and psychological examinations they were significantly below expected norms of reading, arithmetic, and general intelligence. Since it appeared that the majority of the children (patients less than 16 years of age) fell below the norms, we were interested in knowing: (1) what percent of the clinic population was involved, (2) their ethnic background, (3) the degree of their deficiency, and (4) what could be done for them. Since “conduct disorders” represented our predominant population we began viewing the consistent complaints associated with them as describing a dyssocial syndrome as opposed