The prevalence of mild mental retardation in the adult years.

Most mildly retarded children do not receive mental retardation services after leaving school. Those who do, however, represent a sizable proportion of adults receiving services. Nevertheless, their needs may be overlooked, since most adult programmes are designed to serve more severely retarded individuals. In this paper prevalence rates for mild mental retardation in the early adult years are given for one community, and the ways in which rates vary using different definitional criteria are demonstrated. Problems related to estimating the adult service needs of mildly retarded individuals are examined in relation to suggestions offered by Baroff (1982).