MENTAL DEFECTIVES

Stratford Evening Post, Issue 40, 22 February 1929, Page 5

MENTAL DEFECTIVES

131POKTANT FORWARD STEP. ACTION OF MEDICAL COM’EKENCE. WELLINGTON, Last Night. An important step forward and one which should have a far-reaching effect in any future legislation in regard to mental defectives has been taken at the conference of the New Zealand branch of the British Medical Association in its decision to form a New Zealand Council for Mental Hygiene. This body will link up with the international council. Its objects, which will follow the same, lines as the British mental council, will he i.o promote a critical study of the social life, industrial life and environments of the people with a view to eradicating: those factors which lead to mental ill-health and unhappiness; to investigate the various causes, physical and psychological, underlying failures of social, adjustments; to-consider the extent to which clinical psychology may contribute towards the elucidation ■of the problems of habitual criminality, and to study, from the standpoint of prophylaxis, most 1 important of all, the mental hygiene of child life in relation to parental responsibility.