The Press Thursday, July 5, 1923. Mental Disease.

Press, Volume LIX, Issue 17807, 5 July 1923, Page 8

The Press Thursday, July 5, 1923. Mental Disease.

A subject of much importance was late- i ly treated by the Hon. W. H. Triggs, in a speech in the Legislative Council. In this speech, which we reported lost week, Mr Triggs dealt with the need for a 6ancr treatment of victims of temporary mental diseased lor sufferers whose disorders have been classed as permanent, it is probable that we are doing as well, in nineteen cases out of twenty, as can be done. V.'e are certainly doing as well as we know how %a ao in the present at ate of our medicopsychological science. But -our treatment of the others can no longer be excused. Twenty-five years ago Dr. Levinge urged the treatment of incipient mental troubles in "some separate ■'and completely isolated institution," and it is not creditable to our Health Department that ho is urging ifc stillMr Parr's notion of the matter seemed to be that classification and isolation 00-nld both be provided inside the asylunx~walls, and that for those who svanted further refinements; there weM semi-private "homes" out-side. For those whose relatives can afford to pay an indefinite number of guineas a wcels there certainly, arc places in which sufferers can he treated with a better hope of recovery than in an institution treating seven or eight hundred unfortunates in every stage of infirmity. But the patients whose people can pay sis or seven guineas i week aro cot numerous, and it would still be the Government's duty, if there were only a hundred or two instead of four thousand qf the others, to take the most hopeful stepsscionoeknows to restore them to. health again. Aind there is no longer any question. that for ""border-line" cases, nothing la go hopehd as to screen them from the slightest suggestion t-bat they are threatened with lunacy. Only last week n Royal Commission in New South Wales recommended that course precisely which Dr. Levingo has so long advocated, and Mr Triggs had urged on the Government a day or two earlier —via., treatment of all temporary disorders in wards attached to genial hospitals. It is shocking, in a young opeii*air country like this, that we should be sending seven hundred fres'h cases every year into five or six crowded institutions, mere admission into which leaves a life-long shadow. No one can really suppose that some few ab least of that melancholy host could not be given quiet rest nearer homo, and be restored in a few weeks to their families. It does not matter much what tho place of healing is called or by whom it is controlled, so long as tho patient can return home or to business without carrying the stigma of having 'been in an asylum. The special ward in a gen-oral hospital would eeem to offer the best chance to everybody—to the patient to bo observed and treated in tim«, to tho medical stuff for the cooperation that is necessary between physicians and alienists, to relatives and friends for cheerful instead of haunted visits, and to the Government for economic administration. But whatever is done should be done soon.