BETWEEN MARGINALIZATION AND ACCEPTANCE - MENTALLY DISABLED PERSONS IN SOCIAL CONTEXT

The aim of the study is to identify opinions related to mentally disabled people among students. Material and method: 85 students were included in the research; only 26% declared that they had experience with mentally disabled (MD) people. The instrument used was an open-answer questionnaire, which investigation of the following dimensions: the concept of mental disability (the cognitive vs. global perspective), the image of mentally disabled people (characteristics, capacities, disabilities), social integration (social perception, support measures, support institutions, vocational options), education (types of schooling, adjustment problems, relational, behavioral, educational problems and perspectives after graduation). The transcription of interviews was followed by a qualitative analysis performed with the freeware version of the QDA Miner 4 Lite software. Results: The most frequent issues revealed by our study have been the behavioral ones (82%) and 92% of subjects associates MD with loosing social integration and autonomy. 58% of the participants correlate MD with the cognitive impairment; 52% sustain that public institutions must take care of mentally disabled persons. Conclusions: The subjects tend to assess the mentally disabled personality globally, focusing on the diversity of aspects of the mentally disabled personality, and less schematically, focusing only on cognitive aspects specific to mental disability, emphasizing the various non-functional cognitive aspects of the mentally disabled individuals.