MENTAL HOSPITAL CONTROL.

Observer, Volume XXXII, Issue 52, 7 September 1912, Page 2

MENTAL HOSPITAL CONTROL.

Mr Russell's Absurd Suggestion

MR RUSSELL, M.P., who was for five minutes Minister of Public Health and who for that reason, probably, considers himself to be an authority on matters pertaining to the public health, has brought forward a merely silly suggestion to the effect that a Board of Advice would be of great assistance to the superintendents of mental hospitals, and would be a safeguard against any patient being confined after being cured. Mr Russell proposes a board composed of medical experts, which, though not particularly sensible, is yet the most sensible idea in his scheme. If such a board were established it would be futile to have it composed mostly of clergymen, retired schoolmasters, and a couple of doctors, for insanity isn't.always obvious to those unlearned in mental diseases, and one can easily imagine a clever lunatic working on the undisciplined emotions of the inexpert. A board of medical men would be only one degree less futile. It would be futile because a doctor of medicine is not ncessarily a specialist in diseases of the brain, and a doctor who is thoroughly competent to attend to the ailments of other organs of the body may not be competent to express an author-* itative opinion on the sanity or insanity of a patient, unless the patient was in one' of his or her paroxysms, in which case any ordinary man would be as fit to judge.

If Mr Russell intended a board of mental experts, he simply suggested a cumbrous machine for doing something which is done more simply now. A man who invented a machine for striking matches would not get much of a hearing from investors, and Mr Russell's suggestion is similar. Mr Russell says that his proposed board "might lead to a number of patients at present incarcerated in mental hospitals being liberated," which suggests that he hasn't much of an opinion of those at present in charge of our mental hospitals. Nevertheless, the men in charge of the Dominion's insane are expert alienists and the best men the Dominion can get, being well versed in the causes and treatment of insanity, they are the best judges of a patient's fitness for release, and the expert judgment of one would not be greatly different from that of a whole board of alienists. Therefore, the suggested Board of Advice would be a superfluity. If the proposed board is meant as a corrective to incompetent superintendents, supposing there to be any such, then wouldn't it be more simple to appoint competent ones in their place ?

It must be remembered that no patient can be committed to an asylum without a certificate from two doctors, and signed by a Justice of the Peace, and that patients are released just as soon as the superintendent considers they are sufficiently normal to take up the ordinary duties of life without inconvenience to themselves or society. Also, there is a system of inspection of mental hospitals to guard against any possibility of malpractice. In support of his argument, Mr Russell quoted a case which told' very much against it—he could not have chosen a worse illustration. It was of a youth of 17 who had been committed to an asylum because of a criminal offence against a child, had been released, and had committed a second offence of similar nature "while under the influence of liquor," said Mr Russell, who further complained that it was likely that the man would now spend the rest of his life in an asylum. In selecting this case as an argument and in making the complaint, Mr Russell showed plainly how incompetent he is to deal with the matter under discussion.

As a sexual maniac that man is a menace to society, and it is necessary to keep him in confinement. He may be normal in every other way (few lunatics are altogether insane), but in one direction he is dangerous. To most intelligent, but inexpert, men the man might appear rational in every way; but the superintendent of the mental hospital which holds him, is by far the best judge of his mentality, because he has studied his case as given in the hospital reports and knows the man and his habits. The one thing commendable in Mr Russell's otherwise silly suggestion, is the proposal that superintendents of mental hospitals should not be permitted to' also run private asylums—that is a practice which is liable to lead to abuses. There is little chance of abuses being perpetrated in public hospitals, and Mr Russell's little scheme for making the administration of mental asylums more cumbrous must be rejected as it deserves to be.