MENTAL HOSPITALS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 210, 6 September 1939, Page 8

MENTAL HOSPITALS.

THE CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM.

(To the Editor.)

T hope that the public will make a determined effort to brinsr to the no::-» of the Government the conditions exi-ting' in the Mental Hospitals throughout Xew Zealand. In Britain the highest official antiiorities. the members of the state Board of Control, hare expressed the opinion that, in the interest* of treatment, classification of patient* at mental hospitals should be such as to ensure that cases possibly recoverable do not come in contact with cases seeminsly irrecoverable. Xot only has the State Board nf Control expressed this opinion, but also the members of "the Royal Commission which, in Britain investigated the question. At the mental hospitals in Xew Zealand the new.-omer finds himself in enforced close association day and nicht with cases of range neuroses, habitual criminality. imbecility, venereal disease, senility, infantile paralysis, sleeping sickness, and congenital madness. The effect that the actions and speeches of some of the more vicious patients have upon the more sensitive is terrible. The latest available official retnnw show that the number of persons who, at the times of the returns, were patients at mental hospitals 111 Xew Zealand, were one in evierr 104 of the population: and the number of patients at mental hospitals in Britain were one in every 354 of the population. In other words, the indications are that the extent of mental disease in Xew Zealand is almost double the extent of such disease in Britain. The disparity is more significant in the light of the fact that competitive industrialism and economic oppression, which are the main causes of mental strain, are much le-s •pronounced in Xew Zealand than in Britain. Considering what a lot of fuss and bother has •been made in Xew Zealand of late abont

"physical fitness." it surely is about time that we awoke to the equal urgency of other things so closely and inexorably associated—sound mind* a.« well as sound bodies. But -we am never hope to satisfactorily transform defective or sick minds into sound minds by any methods or systems which are themselTet unsound. ALBERT J. HERN".