Disturbed Children

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31088, 17 June 1966, Page 8

Disturbed Children

Sir,—As J. F. Williams says, millions are available for destruction, but children urgently needing help must depend on small change cadged at cold street corners. A “crash programme?” Yes! But where are the people with the power and the will to do the crashing? The Christchurch mental health conference of 1961 was utterly abortive not because some nit stuck a hat-pin

into a cabbage somewhere, but because those in authority are determined to resist every effort which could disturb the even tenor of their cosy status quo. Almost all decent organisations in Christchurch have voted, with their feet, not to listen any more to the platitudes of the Canterbury Association of Mental Health. As for the basic Christians, they gave me much moral support on a particular occasion, but, when the chips were down, all but one passed by on the other side.—Yours, etc., VARIAN J. WILSON. June 16, 1966.

Sir, —J. F. Williams’s suggested crash-survival programme for mental health is rather like propounding the theory of all care but no responsibility. Surely the major part of their energies, and ours also, should be expended on preventing the wrong button being pushed. As no parent has fore-knowledge of his child’s personality before birth, and few the benefit of psychological education, it is inevitable that the wrong button will be pressed at times, however inadvertently, and as often as not by the most conscientious of parents. Until “teacher-psychiatrist” education is part of our secondary school curriculum, enlightening our future home-builders about the vagaries of the right and wrong buttons, until psychiatrists are attached to the school health scheme, and until children’s health camps are open at the same time to both physically and mentally convalescent children, how can the mental health of future generations improve?— Yours, etc., EXCESSIVELY SHY. June 16, 1966.