THE MENTAL HOSPITAL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19658, 9 June 1927, Page 14

THE MENTAL HOSPITAL.

Sir,—While the matter of mental hospitals is under discussion it is well to remember the aspects of needed reform commonly overlooked. These are contained in the platform of the Mental Hospital Reform Association. First, the question of public control like the public hospitals in place of a bureaucracy. Next, the payment to patients for labour of value, as is done to the criminal class m H.M. prisons. Then the power to reopen a case of alleged wrongful committal. And last, but not least, the urgent necessity of borderland homes or their equivalent. A. S. Wilson. Sir —While doubtless well-meant, the letter by T.C., Ex-Nurse, is calculated to do more harm than good. Dr. Gray has just returned with knowledge of valuable improvements which may be mtrO' duced into our treatment of the so-called insane; but, with an apthetic public, what chance has he of eliciting the interest and money necessary to create the long-overdue reforms? Personally, I have complained to the attendant doctor of the Auckland Mental Hospital of the defective diet. Patients have hungry, and sometimes been sickened by the food. "* Unless recently altered, the food supplied to the No. 6 men s ward is inferior in quantity and quality to that in other wards and is not up to the standard describud in your paper. Yet this is the ward in which new patients are tried out. When one thinks of the superior grounds, buildings, sanitation, employments, games, pictureshows, dances, orchestras, gramophones, wireless, segregation of the > tubercular, criminal, etc., to be found elsewhere, it makes him blush for ishame at the paltry outfit of Auckland, Our police, doctors and magistrates need to be more carelul in committing persons to mental hospitals. Police, utterly ignorant of the psvchology of suggestion, do great harm to" sensitive persons. But to keep them over meal hours without food, as they sometimes do, is a shame. Doctors encaged by the police should be paid by the State. Persons examined have a right to name the examining doctors whom they have to pay. Doctors should not be so irrational as to certify persons to be insane, so long as insanity 13 not defined and, according to Dr. Beattie, "cannot be defined." But the magistrate who commits persons to a mental hospital, doing irreparable harm thereby, without so much as seeing or hearine them, forfeits the confidence of the ]ustminded. Another Who Has Suffebed.