HORRORS _OF_ ASYLUMS.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 36, 12 February 1925, Page 5

HORRORS _OF_ ASYLUMS.

POWERFUL ALLEGATIONS. A ROYAL COMMISSION. LONDON, February 11. The chairman of the. Lunacy Commission objected to what he termed the onesided language of a memorandum put in by the Society of Lunacy Reform. This said: "It would take a Dante to describe the distressing horror-striking qualities of the gloomy, odour-laden mental hospital wards." The chairman said that, though it !must be admitted that most deplorable incidents occurred in certain institutions, it should not go forth to the public that intolerable conditions were general in English mental hospitals. Mr. Montgomery Parker, chairman of the National Society for Lunacy Reform, continuing his evidence, insisted that there was much truth in the memorandum. He said he had seen men coming out of the trenches and from mental hospitals and there was little difference between them. It was a terrible thing to mix a drastic purgative with food. The knowledge that their food had been drugged had a serious effect on mental patients. Even when their food was not drugged the patients were often under the impression that it was, and would not touch food for days until they were forced by hunger to do so. In some cases patients were forcibly fed by tubes immediately they refused to cat. (A. and N.Z. Cable.)