MENTAL HOSPITALS REFORM

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 189, 12 May 1928, Page 11

MENTAL HOSPITALS REFORM

Sir, —When I wrote to your paper a fortnight ago I fully expected to see some nice little explanation as a footnote supplied by some departmental head, and I was not disappointed. . . I am willing to vouch for any /statement that I made in my last letter, or in this letter, before any J.P. or commissioner, or any properly authorised authority, except for the assertion (in the form of a question) in my last let- , ter re 75 per cent, of the male attendants at the Porirua Mental Hospital being Roman Catholics. ’ It is, of course, impossible for anyone but the controlling authorities to give quite accurate data in this matter, and if —as the Inspector-General of Hospitals very plainly infers in his footnote to my last letter —the authorities do not ever ask the religion of an applicant, how can he say “in uny event, the figures of 75 per cent, are quite incorrect,” or words to that effect? He cuts the ground from under his feet by practically making an assertion that the controlling authorities there do not know nor do they care what religion (if any) the applicants have been brought up in, and then he practically tells us that the authorities do know all right. That they must know I feel confident. . . After dealing at some length with the Internal conduct of the hospital as he personally found it—food, attendants, etc. —the correspondent, referring to the Inspector-General's footnote re official visitors, concludes: “He must have known quite well that the Red Cross visitors —Mr. Burnett and the other gentleman—and Major Watson, secretary of the Returned Soldiers' Association, do not visit any patients unless they are returned soldiers —they did not even look at me when they passed my bed every fortnight for fifteen months. To try to bolster up a very weak case by drawing a red herring across the track is the only explanation to this lart of the footnote.”—l am, etc., EX-PATIENT. Wellington, May 9.