Idiocy – a deep degree of mental underdevelopment (IQ less than 20), in which there is no thinking and speech; patients pronounce inarticulate sounds, they don’t understand speech, they don’t recognize loved ones. They lack the simplest self-service skills; emotions are elementary and associated with the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the food instinct; taste, smell, skin sensitivity are reduced, which explains the lack of reactions to damage that the patient can do to himself (bites, scratches, hits himself). Purposeful activity is absent. Patients lie in an embryonic position or make stereotyped movements. Idiocy is often combined with gross defects in physical development and reactivity. Patient viability is low.
Imbecility
Imbecility – the average degree of mental underdevelopment (IQ 35-49 – mild imbecility, IQ 20-34 – pronounced imbecility).
It is characterized by rudimentary thinking, the possibility of developing simple conditioned reflexes – the skills of neatness and self-care. The patients have a small vocabulary, the processes of distraction and generalization are not available to them, as a result of which they can only determine specific differences and similarities in objects, when distracted from a specific situation they become helpless; prone to mechanical imitation, work is performed according to the template and under control. Patients have an emotional reaction to the attitude of others: some are timid, indecisive and easily inhibited, others are pugnacious, aggressive, require attention, self-centered. In some cases, disinhibition of drives is observed – hypersexuality, gluttony.
Imbecility can be diagnosed from the first years of life. By the year children do not recognize loved ones, do not respond to speech, do not show due interest in toys, facial expressions in such children are not differentiated. At the age of 2-4 years, children are inattentive, do not understand speech addressed to them, respond to voice intonations, and not to the meaning of speech, do not show curiosity, their game activity is stereotyped or in the form of manipulating toys. In preschool and primary school age, patients cannot master quantitative temporal concepts.