PREVENTION OF DISEASE

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 54, Issue 3899, 10 May 1937, Page 5

PREVENTION OF DISEASE

INTERNATIONAL ACTION. AUCKLAND SOCIETY’S CONTENTIONS. Under the chairmanship of Mr Robert Peter, the National Physical and Mental Welfare Advisory Board in Auckland last Monday passed the following important resolutions:— 1. That Miss Violet Lewis be appointed the representative of the Phy--sical and Mental Welfare Society at the forthcoming International Congress for Mental Hygiene, to be held in Paris in July. 2. That, in view of the unanimous conclusions of mental specialists that (a) physical ailments in many cases arising or being aggravated by mental disability and vice versa, (b) a large proportion of mental disability being preventable by correct nutritional and psychological treatment of children, (c) malnutrition (the outstanding feature of social life in all civilised communties) now being known to affect not only, the physical health but also the mental condition (especially in children), and (d) the League of Nations having, in November, 1935, recommended to the Governments of the world that national policies be adopted of inquiry into the dietary habits of their peoples and (that the medical curricula be altered to meet modern exigencies, the International Congress at Paris be requested to ask its delegates to press forward in their respective countries the immediate adoption of the health recommendations of the League of Nations, to the end that a world policy of prevention of physical and mental disability be initiated. 3. That, in view of the following conditions—(a) overcrowding of mental asylums being general in all parts of the world, (b) the adoption of adequate nutritional, psychological, recreational, vocational, and medical treatment of patients being impossible by reason of such overcrowding, (c) medical advice having been received that in certain cases high-tem-perature patients have been incorrectly placed in asylums but that the facts would be difficult to establish, (d) the estates of patients who have been released and have been living normal lives in the community for a number of years still being retained under the present mental deficiency Jaw machinery, (e) medical scientists being generally agreed that the presmental deficiency law is archaic botii in name and in form, and should be replaced by mental health laws applicable to all groups of nervous and mental disease, (f) and the undeserved “ stigma ” still attaching to any patient who has been received (even if only for a short time) for treatment by the present class of asylum—the International Congress in Paris be requested to ask its delegates to press their various Governments to merge all mental health administration into that of extended national health departments (or national prevention of ill-health departments) to the end that, patients suffering from nervous and mental ailments may participate without delay in the more rational methods of amelioration and cure of ill-health as well as in the more reasonable attitude toward nervous and mental patients that must shortly be adopted by the Governments of the world.

A resolution was passed supporting Dr G. B. Chapman and Mr Thomas A. F. Stone in their theories that infantile paralysis is probably another of the deficiency diseases, and approval was expressed of articles to be published on this subject. Letters were read from the wife (five children) of a returned soldier in an asylum, from the parents of a boy of 19 years in a mental hospital, and from a mental patient desiring his full or partial discharge for the purpose of having individual treatment. Conclusive proof was given that in consequence of overcrowding and under-staffing of our mental hospitals those in charge are unable to do justice to themselves or to their patients in the way of attention and treatment. Dr T. Gordon Short was elected to the National Council of the Physical and Mental Welfare Society, and a resolution was passed unanimously thanking him for the fearless stand he is taking in the cause of the more scientific treatment and the more humanitarian care of mental hospital patients.