MENTAL HOSPITALS

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 19, 23 January 1926, Page 16

MENTAL HOSPITALS

PROPOSED REFORMS IN

FRANCE.

Beforo the reassembling of the French Chamber and the Senate, perennial agitation about the treatment of the insane has begun, says the Paris correspondent of the "New York Times." According to the present law it is sufficient for one doctor to certify to insanity. Such a system, it is pointed out, makes it easy for criminally minded persons having some money interest at stake to cause a relative to be "put away." The connivance of a medical man and a little apathy on the part of the asylum administration are alone needed.

It is not believed that such extreme cases are frequent, wrong being more often done inadvertently. A French alienist thus summed up the situation a short time ago: "Under the present system there is no inconvenience attached to certifying aj insane a person who is not insane, while there may be the most serious consequences if one aserts that a person is not insane and it afterward turns out that be is."

So many violent crimes are committed in France by persons mentally "unbalanced" that doctors are extremely wary. Only the other day a man newly liberated from an asylum as "cured" murdered hiß wife and their two children. Immediately, of course, outcries were raised against the keepers and nurses that had had the man under observation for a number of years, and against the alienists that had conducted his final examination.

Apart from the inmates of expensive private institutions and those who are privately cared for in their own homes, France has at present 80,----000 persons shut up in State asylums for the insane. A recent publication declares that fully 50,000 of these could be set at liberty without danger either to themselves or to society.

Public opinion is at present agitating for broad reforms in the administration of such institutions. It is urged that there should be a better system of keeping the harmless and the curable separated from the dangerous and the incurable; that the preliminary examination should always be made by several medical men, one at least being appointed by the State.

The great difficulty in the path of realising these reforms is pecuniary. France has no money to spend.on carrying out asylum reforms, even were they legislated. The managers of these retreats are at present allowed by the State from 9 francs to 4 francs 75 centimes for each patient—this to cover all expenses. Out of that sum they have to feed their unfortunate patients and provide their own personnel. Inmates are said to be halfstarved, and, owing to the desperate shortage of attendants, they have largely to be confined.