MENTAL AILMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19384, 20 July 1926, Page 10

MENTAL AILMENTS.

The appeal of the InspectorGeneral of Mental Hospitals for a more sympathetic attitude to sufferers from ailments of the mind will not fall altogether on deaf ears. The bad old days when mental disease was customarily regarded as beyond cure, and the victim of it as a potential murderer needing nothing but secure confinement, are rapidly passing. Among medical, men, at all events, the growth of knowledge has brought better understanding of the nature, the causes and the cures of many forms of such disease. No longer are cases grouped by even the- inexpert public as equally hopeless. Nevertheless, Dr. Gray's appeal is timely. It will strengthen desirably the growing view and win additional support for those entrusted with the ministry by saner means to minds diseased. There is still some public misconception, and sn long as even a small measure of that persists the means will lag behind the need. That in most respects many mental patients are as normal as those outside the institutions is not yet as generally taken for granted as Dr. Gray pleads it should be. It should certainly be a ruling principle in the institutions themselves, and happily the prevailing tendency is to make them homes rather than mere places of restrictive detention. This tendency should have very cordial support. Expenditure on a more generous scale than was once deemed sufficient is demanded by this more creditable policy. It should not be grudged.

Everything possible should be done, in keeping with advancing knowledge, to make these institutions serve a curative purpose in,all cases marked by any hope' of recovery—a coming generation may wonder that in our day the- range of such cases was not larger than it is—and to provide humane conditions in all others. Practical support for this policy is included in any worthy response to Dr. Gray's appeal for a more sympathetic public attitude.