MENTAL HOSPITAL SCANDALS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 14807, 10 October 1911, Page 6

MENTAL HOSPITAL SCANDALS.

Speaking at. Wellington last night Mr. Fowlds, - after* referring to the complimentary tone of the press upon his retirement from the Ministry, said that he had been " both pained and surprised at the almost equally universal failure < of the press to realise the possibility of' any person taking the step I have done simply for the. purpose of forwarding his ideals for the betterment of human society.". Yet it was Mr. Fowlds himself, who retorted upon an article published in the Herald detailing in a restrained and unexaggerating fashion-the terrible condition of the Auckland Mental Hospital due to its overcrowding by saying that "he could not help suggesting that if the general election had not been quite so near such a sensational article would not have gone through the press of the Dominion." This retort was evidently considered quite effective by the Cabinet for which Mr. Fowlds then acted as * spokesman, and we may anticipate the same, brutal and insolent comment when we refer to the murder of a patient in the Porirua Mental Hospital and to the rider of the jury drawing the attention of the Government to. the overcrowded state of the ' institution, compelling the use of the day rooms as dormitories. At Porirua the pitiable victim and the no less pitiable culprit "of this sordid tragedy were herded in a room with half-' a-dozen others, and who shall say to what extent the depressing and disturbing surroundings may have impelled the irresponsible brain of an insane man to maniacal outbreak At Auckland, a somewhat similar tragedy drew public attention to the local Mental Hospital, and there was never any question that the statements made by the Herald were well within the facts. We may be sure that much the same state of affairs exists in every other mental hospital in the Dominion, and . that taking them as a whole they are— spite of the devotion of their medical chiefs—a disgrace to* New, Zealand and a blot upon the fair -fame of its pepple. ■'■' They are so, overcrowded and so inadequate that proper classification is impossible and : the decencies of life are" largely lost by those unfortunates who by no fault o£, their own have been consigned to these infernos. It is ; not possible touse language- too strong to. describe the * condition ' of the insane and imbecile where they are herded and crowded■' together like .cattle^ in railway trucks. : Conditions become bad enough where the strong-minded, and the conventionally ordered have to be herded together, crowded into corridors, bedded down in day rooms. Imagination cannot conceive what this means > when the same circumstances .'. are applied to persons whose mental afflictions assume a thousand diverse forms, where ■■ the mildly melancholic and the aggressive maniac, the gentle victim of innocent "delusion, and the no less innocent victim of shattered self-control, cannot be effectively classified and - effectively treated. The horrors of this state cannot be det. bribed in language permissible to the public press, but they are known to every person who has an intimate knowledge of overcrowded mental hospitals; and they are the more horrible because the victims are quite powerless, are tacitly supposed to be unreliable, and are only too glad when released to seal their lips upon the sad secrets of their prisonhouse. And yet the public is asked to believe that the press is ; only interested in exposing these horrible during election years. That Mr. Fowlds, * himself a kindly, and a .generous man, and . so - eager to be regarded as having high ideals - and as desirous of bettering human society, should' so callously andj cruelly have glossed over this notori-1 ous scandal, and >.-■-. should ;'; have ascribed the lowest political motives to those who ventilated mental hospital abuses, shows how the Government regards the matter. -It was early in August when the matter came before Parliament in the debate that arose,over' the Herald articles; it is later in October when we have crimson evidence that nothing has been done * to remedy • this gravest of scandals and abuses. 'Is is too much to say that this poor victim at Porirua has been slaughtered by the Administration, and is it to be doubted that many a sufferer is still incarcerated in our mental hospitals whom decent conditions and wholesome surroundings would have restored to the world? For this murder is only the crowning sorrow of a monstrous and unendurable burden of infamies and sorrows heaped by indifferent and negligent government upon the heads of those whom even savages hold sacred, and for whom every pitiful man feels a most profound compassion. The gates of a Mental Hospital may close upon any manv'or woman in the land, upon the fondest mother or the most studious son, upon the hardest-work* ing and the most affectionate ana the most intellectual of men. r In these days of " stress and strain, of mental excitement and unrelaxing exertion, none is safe. Yet, while the Government exhausts itself in

making prisons, like drawingrooins,; in pampering criminals and in making pleasant the cells of felons, it has no time to spare ■ and no moneyto spend in giving to the mentally afflicted the ordinary decencies of human life, or '■ in making possible the classification without which murder and every other brutality is tacitly invited and encouraged. \